What is the biking equivalent of 90 mpw?

Cyclist tend to be whiners and compare themseleves to runners too often.

In the end, most tri's and cyclist are failed runners or failed athletes.

Wise Guy wrote:

I'm guessing you couldn't handle the biking equivalent of 90 miles a week of running. I mean, can you imagine a biker with no running experience just deciding to go out and run 90 miles a week?

Not true. I once did a bike tour off of zero cycling training, just running. I did 3 weeks of 100-150 miles a day on an ancient bike, on mountainous terrain, carrying 50 pounds of gear (tent, food, stove, etc.) I rode pretty hard every day, and felt great the whole time. Cycling really is easy on the body.

When I started running again after a couple months of just cycling, going out for an easy five miles would trash my legs.

somosilion wrote:

Wise Guy wrote:

I'm guessing you couldn't handle the biking equivalent of 90 miles a week of running. I mean, can you imagine a biker with no running experience just deciding to go out and run 90 miles a week?

Not true. I once did a bike tour off of zero cycling training, just running. I did 3 weeks of 100-150 miles a day on an ancient bike, on mountainous terrain, carrying 50 pounds of gear (tent, food, stove, etc.) I rode pretty hard every day, and felt great the whole time. Cycling really is easy on the body.

When I started running again after a couple months of just cycling, going out for an easy five miles would trash my legs.

And it was uphill both ways and the force of gravity was twice then that it is today. 0/10

sprint7 wrote:

As you can probably gather from my other posts, I've been injured for a while, but biking is unaffected by my injury. So in order to maintain some semblance of aerobic capacity (heck Tadese was a pro biker before a half marathoner), I was wondering what amount of aerobic distance on a bike would be roughly equivalent to 90 mpw running?

I really know nothing about biking, but just judging by all the upright cycling world records, they seem to be about double the pace of running records. So I'm guessing maybe 180 mpw? Terrain is flat to moderate hills.

Thanks

Think of minutes at a given effort and not miles (that is best for running to, of course). It is even more important on a bike to think of your training volume at minutes/effort rather than distance. All the good cyclists I know don't talk about miles in their training. Minutes at a given wattage. Going out and riding 40 miles at 15 mph wouldn't even get my HR in the low 100's. When I had a long crosstraining period, I counted a given ride in minutes at a run-appropriate HR as equivalent to a run of the same HR and that worked pretty well.