Comment by digital-cygnet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digital-cygnet | Hacker News Reader

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Taking this in good faith, as the HN guidelines ask us to, I'm fairly certain that either your recollection or your measuring equipment is faulty.

Taking the "less impressive" https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 as an example, you're claiming 60kph (37 mph) for nearly an hour over flat terrain. According to this cycling calculator [1] with some generous assumptions, that's over 800W average for an hour -- smashing the world record of 440 [2]. Similarly, that handily beats the world record of 55km in one hour [3], set by a professional in a velodrome under perfect conditions with a custom bike (including being at altitude for lower air resistance)

These claims are from 30-40 years ago so I don't fault you for misremembering specific times and distances, but cycling is a sport where people really obsess over numbers and metrics, and these just don't pass the sniff test.

[1] https://www.omnicalculator.com/sports/cycling-wattage

[2] http://www.creakybottombracket.com/home/2020/1/23/events-the...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_record

Well. What can I say? I've been unaware of the hour record.

What I can do say is that at the times I described my sustainable top performance on flat grounds without (noticable) winds as 55kph for one hour. Though that is hard to compare to something done in a velodrome, or on closed streets, since I did that in normal traffic. OFC I had to sometimes stop because of red lights which I couldn't overrun without crashing or causing crashes. Also I needed something to eat after that, like a banana, or an apple, maybe some nuts, and to drink, water, orange juice, or something isotonic.

However, in cities I've comfortably gone with the flow of cars, sometimes overtaking them, outside of them there was now flow, because less cars.

Maybe it's a good thing not knowing what the record is? :-)

Regarding the route on google maps which I posted, and you reposted, I don't know wtf google is doing! The route it shows when I click your repost isn't what it showed me when I reconstructed it to show!

Edit: rechecked right now, it is even showing me another one. That is unusable, because for the one I reconstructed to show here I already marked the vias to get the right one. Somehow that seems to get lost in the link it presents to share.

Edit: further reading about those records...

I wore lose fitting t-shirts, and short sport shorts. no helmet, and didn't shave my legs. Also, the heresy of not wearing pure white socks! And no special shoes clicking into the pedals, just normal running shoes fitting into something called "Tretkorb" on the pedal.

s/now flow/no flow

That isn't really flat, but mostly downsloped for the first half, even if only slightly. I know it sounds unreasonable, because people then didn't believe me either.

Except when they've seen me doing it.

Edit: I also caught fire for being unimpressed with Tour de France and the likes, at the times.

Edit: Also klicking that link it seems to be a different route now, which would be a detour almost to the Airport of Cologne. (Sigh). The route I took was more direct, about 55km.

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