Bicycling in Snow

Tdacks

I decided to be stupidly optimistic, and do my first bike ride to work today after the big snowstorm we had here yesterday. We got 5 inches of powder over a layer of ice.

The route was 1.4 miles from my door to the gate where I work, and it was about another .5 mile from the gate to my building.

First, I could only safely ride on the street for a very short part where the bike lane or right hand lane was plowed. There was some cleared sidewalk, but that meant literally climbing a small mountain of snowplow leavings to get onto/off of. For large stretches, the sidewalk was unplowed and/or piled up with plowed snow/ice from the road. There were moderate hills.

It took me about 45 minutes each way. I could have walked the route faster without the bike, since i had to push and wrestle it so much. The way back was the same distance and conditions, but on a different route.

I'm stumped on how to do exercise/calorie counting for this trip. It turns out there is no entry for "slogging through snow and ice while pushing a commuter bicycle, uphill both ways."

Any ideas?

sullenbee

For all my bike rides, I use endomondo, because you can set it to automatically link your workouts to here. While I'm not sure how accurately it measures riding in snow (because it logs it as a leisurely ride when I ride so slow ) it at least gives you somewhat of an idea of how many calories you burned.

sprintto50

Log it as a walk, and know you had a bigger deficit yesterday than the computer shows.

Tdacks

I ended up logging it as 1/3 walking 1/3 biking and 1/3 hiking w/ 20lb load.

I walked the route without the bicycle today, and used the C25K app on the Distance plan. I logged 80% of that to account for the difference between calorie burn while running and walking.