- Morning Trainiacs,
we're gonna do something a little bit fun today,
slightly pointless and hopefully a little bit interesting.
What we've got here is we have
my single speed commuter bike, we have my road bike,
and then we have my super high end top of the line,
like is basically as many upgrades as you can do, tri bike.
And what we're gonna do,
is we're going to use the same power pedals on all of these,
do some tests out and back,
and give you a sense of basically how much speed you get
as you go from whatever bike you really have in your garage,
to potentially a road bike,
which is the next step that most people make, to a tri bike.
So you can start gauging, alright, well,
if I wanna put no money into it,
here's about what I would ride on.
If I wanna buy a entry level road bike,
here's about the speed I'd ride at,
and if I wanna upgrade to the high end triathlon bike,
here's about what I would ride at.
Completely unscientific,
but, a little bit fun and hopefully engaging.
Kind of informative. Maybe it'll help some of you,
we'll see, let's do it.
(upbeat music)
So how this test is gonna go,
is we're going to do a bunch of different trials
with a bunch of different bikes.
With each bike, what we're gonna do is,
two different sections of 150 watts and 210 watts,
to give you an example of going kind of easiest pace,
going a little bit harder pace.
We're gonna go three and a half minutes out,
turn around, three and a half minutes back,
so that we are accounting for the differences
in turning abilities between all of the bikes.
Then, we're gonna go back home, see what the data tells us,
spoiler alert, this one's gonna be the fastest.
(bright upbeat music)
We realized something, that I can't take the pedals off of
the single speed here.
But, often what happens on city and single speed bikes.
So, we aren't gonna be able to put the power pedals on this,
but, I know that the roughly average speed
that I was doing on the tri bike and the road bike
was around 31k an hour.
So what I can do is, I'm gonna at least a decent sense of
how an effort level feels to get to a certain point.
So, I'm gonna try to get to the 31k an hour,
and we're gonna use perceived exertion,
kind of guess the power which is gonna be way off,
but heart rate is gonna give a pretty decent comparison.
(upbeat music)
Talk me out of that next time. Oh, Jesus!
Alright, Trainiacs,
we've got all the data off the Garmin 1030.
Plus we've synced it all,
we've done everything we could
to make it as accurate as possible.
Now I recognize this isn't a scientific test,
we're not in a wind tunnel,
we're not in a perfectly controlled environment,
it's just me, it's not quite a number of people
performing the test over and over and over.
This can give us at least an indication
of how different performance gain
or detriment we're going to have,
based on the bike that we choose.
Now, we know that a tri bike is going to be the fastest,
that's why they exist and there's a few reasons for that.
If you wanna dig into a little bit more about
when to buy tri bike, why to buy a tri bike,
at what point you should buy a tri bike,
go to triathlonbikefoundations.com,
this is our book on getting set up
with all of your bike gear,
when you should buy different bike gear
and what order you should buy different bike gear,
when you should actually buy a tri bike
and when you shouldn't really worry about it.
If you don't wanna buy it, that's cool,
but it is pretty highly rated.
We actually recommend that for your first few triathlons,
you really just use whatever bike you have,
a road bike is fine, a city bike is fine.
You don't really need to upgrade to that tri bike,
until you know that you are going to be doing triathlons
for a long period of time.
And the reason for that,
is because it's a very specific kind of bike.
You can't really take a tri bike out,
on a group ride with a lot of people,
you can't take it off roading at all,
like you could with a gravel bike.
You really can only do triathlons with it
and triathlon training with it.
Whereas road bikes, you can do triathlons,
you can do group rides, gravel bikes, you can do triathlons,
if you change out the tires, you can do group rides,
you can do off road riding, they're a lot more versatile,
whereas a tri bike, is going to basically be
really specifically dedicated to one thing.
And it's also not that comfortable to train on,
I probably spend 80, 85% of my training time
on the road bike,
and really just in the last three, four months
before a race, I start pulling out the tri bike,
to get comfortable in that tri position.
Now the reasons that a tri bike
is going to outperform a road bike, are aerodynamics.
With the tri bike, I'll show you this photo here,
you can see how tucked in and how small
my frontal profile is.
But 80% of the drag that we have to push through the air,
is created by our body, not the bike.
So the more we can get into that aero position the better.
And you might be saying,
"What if I just put a pair clip on aerobars
onto a road bike?"
Yeah, that's what we actually recommend,
for people starting out.
But the reason that that isn't excellent long term,
is because, on a road bike,
your hip angle is quite a bit more closed.
Whereas on a tri bike, it's a fair bit more open.
So that ends up just being less scrunched up,
which results in better run performance
when you get off the bike.
And remember, we are stringing together swim, bike, run,
it's not how fast can you swim,
and how fast can you bike and how fast can you run,
it's how fast can you swim, bike, run.
And if you go and you get really, really fast,
into a really aero position on the bike,
and you're doing that on a road bike, great,
but I guarantee you're not going to have
as good a performance on the run,
as if you put out that same kind of effort on a tri bike.
So now, let's finally get into the actual data
that we ended up finding.
How much slower was the road bike from the tri bike?
So we're gonna start off with 150 watts on the tri bike.
And at 150 watts, I was able to hold 31.2 kilometers,
that is roughly around 19 miles per hour.
In that seven minutes span, I went 3.65 kilometers,
we're talking roughly a little bit over two miles,
and that was the fastest, obviously.
But let's slide over and see how much slower
the road bike was.
Well, I went 29.7 kilometers per hour,
roughly around 18 miles per hour,
I rode 3.48 kilometers,
and that is 4.81% slower than the tri bike.
Now, how much slower is that going to make us
on each of the distances?
Well, for a sprint, the average bike finish time
is 40 minutes, and it's going to be 1.92 minutes,
basically two minutes slower,
than if you were on a tri bike.
On an Olympic, the average time is one hour 20 minutes
on average people are gonna be,
just under four minutes slower
finishing the bike portion of it.
On a 70.3 race, you're going to be somewhere
just a little bit north of eight and a half minutes slower,
and for a full Ironman, around 18 and a half minutes slower.
Now, in addition to that, these are just the bike times.
Remember what I said about
not having as good a run performance after the bike?
Well, you're going to combine, have a slower bike
as we've demonstrated here, and a slower run,
if you are using the road bike. So it is significant.
Let's move up to the 210 watt effort,
if you're going a little bit faster.
Well, we got up to 35.1 kilometers per hour on the tri bike,
going 4.11 kilometers total,
and when we shift over and see
how we did on the road at that same effort level,
with the same pedals, with same calibration,
we were 33.5 kilometers per hour,
went going 3.91 total kilometers,
going 4.56% slower.
How much slower is that for each of the distances?
Same sort of thing a little bit under two minutes
for a sprint, about three and a half minutes for an Olympic,
a little over eight minutes for a half Ironman,
and right at 17 and a half minutes for the Ironman.
And beyond that,
what I noticed out there while I was riding,
is that there is a fair bit of wind penalty,
with the road bike.
Now, I started at a rolling start,
and then started at the exact same point every single trial.
And what I did, was I turned around
at three and a half minutes
and what I found with the road bike,
is that, with the way that I was going
when I had the wind more at my back,
I went significantly further than on the way out,
with the road bike. Whereas on the tri bike,
it was a lot more even.
And what that's telling me,
is that there's a significant wind and aero penalty
to the road bike. That's what we know,
this is confirming what we know.
And then just for fun to get up
to that same 31 kilometers per hour,
which I monitored on this as I was riding on the city bike,
the single speed, it was significantly harder.
I wanna say that,
that was comparable to...
I think how that felt, it felt bad.
Somewhere around 250, 60 watts,
like I probably couldn't hold that effort
for longer than around 20 or 30 minutes
without completely losing it.
So, we're talking like 10, 15, 20% slower than the tri bike.
I certainly don't recommend doing a longer distance race
on a single speed bike.
No, no, no, no, no!
That was not pleasant.
But if you're just getting into the sport,
and you wanna do a sprint, you wanna do an Olympic,
and you wanna use whatever fixie bike you got out there,
it's only gonna make a difference of, who knows?
Anywhere from four to 10 or 15 minutes.
And if you're in that sort of case,
that's what you're ridding,
you're probably just looking to finish the race,
in which case, use whatever bike you got. That's cool.
So I recognize that this isn't a scientific thing,
and I'm probably just telling you something you already know
that a tri bike is going to be faster than a road bike.
But here are some stats about how much time
you're going to lose,
sticking with that road bike so you can make a decision
about whether or not you think it's worth it to upgrade.
Is that potentially 18 and a half minutes in an Ironman
worth it to you?
It's worth it to me because, I'm a triathlete,
I'm committed to triathlon.
And, as we recommend in here,
once you get committed to triathlon,
then it's time to start worrying about a tri bike.
Until then, like I say, use whatever bike you want,
go to triathlonbikefoundations.com,
you can get the digital book, the audio book,
you can link out to the physical book that is on Amazon,
I think it's our highest rated book
of all the books that we've done, or not.
Either one is cool with me,
but if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below. Later Trainiacs.