Where numbers get crunched. Or atoms anyway.

Putting some numbers together on cycling and running

As an Art and English Major I’ve never been all that good at math. But basic numbers still fascinate me.

For example, if you maintain your cadence on the bike at an average of 90 rpms, then you pedal 5,400 times an hour. Ride 3 hours and you’ve pedaled 16,200 times. And that’s just on a typical Saturday morning.

Add up all the riding you do and it gets even more interesting. I’ve ridden 20,000 miles in the last 7 years. That’s about 2857 miles per year. At an average of 17 mph that’s 1,176 hours on the bike, or 49 total days of cycling over the last 7 years. Correct me if I’m wrong…

Since there’s 24 hours in a day and you pedal about 5400 times an hour, that adds up to 129,000 rpms per cycling “day”, or 6,350,400 rpms in the last 7 years.

You can see why you forget to keep up your cadence once in a while. Fall slack and pedal along at 80 instead of 90 rpms. Or 90 instead of 100.

Pros roll

The numbers for a pro cyclist would dwarf the numbers someone like me puts up. Many of the best pros roll 10,000 miles a year. And they ride so much faster, averaging who knows how fast per mile in training. Or kilometers. They ride kilometers in Europe, don’t they? Of course they do. It just sounds better. 15.5 miles? Nada. 25 kilometers? That rocks.

The point is that cycling is a pretty insane game when it comes to numbers. We punish ourselves mentally for dropping cadence, slacking on the MPH or KPH and yet the miles still add up.

Stride for stride

Running has its own numbers games as well. Runners don’t worry so much about cadence or strides per minute like cyclists. But perhaps we should. Some of us have strides that are too long or inefficient. We could perhaps learn a few things about running from riding.

I’ve run an estimated 50,000 miles in my running career. It could be higher, but I doubt it. It’s hard to calculate if you rule out all the miles of running in soccer, basketball, baseball and all the other sports. Tennis. It just keeps going. It’s a wonder my feet aren’t nubs. Well, they kinda are.

But if I’ve averaged 8:00 per mile for 50,000 miles that adds up to 400,000 minutes of running. That’s 6,666 hours, which is kind of scary. Maybe I’ve been chased by Satan all these years. Or my own demons, more likely. Either way, that 666 thing is creepy. It all breaks down to 277 days of running. Not quite a full year of my life. But close enough.

Like I said, I’m not that good at math, so if you check the numbers you might find I’ve made a mistake here or there. So be it. The fact that I’ve run close to a year of my life makes me feel weird though. I mean, that is weird, right?

My mind works better with words, anyways. Which is why I took the section on CYCLING in this article and put it through Wordle to create a Word Cloud, showing which words stand out in the thought process. Then I did the same for the RUNNING section of today’s blog, and look at the words that show up.

Numbers or words. They fly through our heads and sometimes land on a page. We Run and Ride through WordClouds and number games. And never really know it.