Emma Coburn Ridiculous Biking Schedule

Yeah…is it possible to do a screen shot of her IG post. Based upon what the original post read, I am thinking she is riding 50 hours per week.

I am not going to create an IG account. Will the original poster please share the info

What is her bike training? 5 pages & a claim that her bike schedule is ridiculous. It probably is! But not for a professional athlete. Top triathletes will train 20-30 hours/week w./ > 50% of that as biking (12-18 hours). Professional cyclists will bike even more. I don't know what ridiculous is because nobody named the # of hours. She could have built up to ~4 hours/day average & I'd be like whatever if that's her only activity.

Emma does not have the history of chronic injuries and stagnated performances suggestive of ED.

Recent history says otherwise. 8th at 2022 Worlds, then major hamstring injury that seems to have caused her to miss the finals at Worlds 2023, and then in the first race of the 2024 season she breaks a bone landing awkwardly in the water pit. I do recognize that not everyone who gets injured has an ED/exercise addiction, but again the OP is talking about how she took NO REST after the surgery. Even elite/pros should rest, particularly when the next season is almost a year away and their bodies are clearly telling them to ease up for a bit.

It's also absurd to look at the training schedule of an Olympic medalist and use it as evidence of exercise addiction.

Why is it absurd? Does being an Olympic medalist automatically exempt you from having an ED or exercise addiction?

I never said being a pro exempts a person from ED. I said that we can't use the schedule of a pro athlete as evidence of exercise addiction. Exercise is literally the job of these athletes.

I also said that Emma's history does not indicate an ED. If you think coming in 8th in a 3000m race as a 31-year-old (five years after winning a World Championship) is a poor performance, you have strange metrics. It's not uncommon for people to get stuck in an injury cycle or to have periods of sub-par performance. She won 10 consecutive national championships! I seriously doubt a person with an ED could do this. Long periods of superior performance are inconsistent with ED.

People with EDs often cannot make it to the line for years at a time. We often see a history of 10+ stress fractures. This very different that sustaining a traumatic injury after clipping one's foot on a steeple barrier or straining one's hamstring.

Maybe she needs a break, or maybe people need to avoid jumping to conclusions because they don't have enough information.

Thanks for your reply. It's rare to get a reasonable discussion on these forums, I appreciate it.

I do agree with you that Emma's overall history does not indicate ED (and I'm not an expert at all!) I should have been more clear that the drive to exercise and not take any rest is concerning and could suggest something else. But you've convinced me that ED is probably not the case and is quite a stretch.

That said, I still don't understand why can't we use the schedule of a pro athlete as evidence? Just because it's their job? There are plenty of pro athletes who have EDs and are open about it. But that's probably a worn-out discussion/thread for another day.

Lastly, I do agree with you that maybe she's needs a break. I'm not jumping to conclusions, just expressing some possibilities. I just wish she would rest up for a bit!

This doesn’t seem too serious but certainly obsessive. Has she determined training zones through testing? Is she using a power meter? Is she using cycling shoes? 6 hours? Triathlete training for an Ironman will hit some 6 hour rides but not too many, especially in a trainer. Or maybe she’s going by the old rule of thumb of cross training, 8 minutes on the bike count for one on the ground.

High volume cross training on the bike is something I feel confident in 20 years will be the norm. Another poster mentioned how much more training you can perform on the bike.

Biking stimulates aerobic development, and it's very low impact. This is something Valby has notably used to great effect. It's not difficult to stack 2-3 hours daily training on the bike on top of your traditional running program.

-Para

Pro cyclists ride 20-30 hours per week, according to the internet, so 40 hrs on the stationary bike would be huge.

Not if it's the equivalent of a treadmill desk where people typically set them to around 2mph with the goal just to not be sitting still all day.

People who use "site" when they mean "cite" shouldn't call others morons.

Cycling will become more popular as a way to train with low impact.

Check out this training schedule of the world record holder in speed skating. Almost all cycling (a lot of cycling)

https://www.howtoskate.se/_files/ugd/e11bfe_b783631375f543248e271f440bcd45c5.pdf

Completely irrelevant. Skaters have been biking in the off season for decades because you use the same muscles in biking and skating. Same with xc skiing. When the skate style emerged in the 1980s, skiers started to bike in the summer.

That is probably why the fastest runners are the triathletes. Oh, wait...

That's one step above "I cited the internet."

I disagree. The instagram account of the subject is a primary source. It is content the person themselves publishes. It could be lies, but it is lies the person wants to put out there.

Citing a random you tube video or google search, or a different person's instagram account is definitely suspect.

Cycling is "easy" compared to running, when I tore a hamstring I could bike literally all day despite not being able to walk across the apartment, cycling took hours per day to maintain the same loads as just an hour of running at tempo.

and Emma is easily more fit than anyone posting in this thread, probably takes dozens of hours a week to maintain that, impossibly low body fat too = super high vo2max

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Emma regularly posts stories and reels (that disappear so you can't link them) that she stationary bikes upwards of 5 hours a day plus right now 40 miles of running.

When she was first coming off her surgery, she took..less than a week off fully and posted a story of her proudly working out on the stationary bike in her boot. And she posted the amount of time riding, it was around 3-4 hours a day.

A few things: she rarely posts about rest or recovery.

She said at the time her Dr cleared her to workout. Ok, maybe. It seemed so odd that there wasn't a more..conservative recovery process and tbh, the writing was/is on the wall: the season was lost, so just fully rest. But NOPE! it was incredibly "look at me! I won't stop!"

2. Emma actually posts about this pretty regularly. If you don't follow then you don't see it, but it's there and they are right: it's weird. Its strange to promote hours and hours of cross training when logically your broken and pinned ankle probably needs rest. You know what else is weird? The blind acceptance and worship of the behavior. Everyone on her comments gives her praise about how big a "warrior" she is, her dedication to the pro lifestyle etc. It's happening here, in these comments. The op is questioning THAT..why does sport endorse such extreme behavior and act like if we don't we can't be great.

What's the consequence?

This was the caption on her post four days ago (copied and pasted, bolding added for emphasis):

I'm not a fan of Verzbicas ever since he got more active on Twitter but I do think he definitely would have influenced that more cross-training oriented approach had he not had the bike crash. The path he was on was likely to lead to Olympic gold in the triathlon while also staying very competitive in pure running events. Probably one of the biggest "what if's" in endurance sports history.