Marathon Comparative?

stuart_c-2

So, I have often read of people talking about how riding 100 miles isn’t as hard as running a marathon, or doing this or that or whatever isn’t as hard as running a marathon.

In people’s opinions what, if anything, is comparable to running a marathon? 150 miles? Doing the 100 miles off road? Doing it on square wheels to get the buggered knee and ankle effect?

Come on, throw out your anecdotes.

Stu

frisbee

I think the speed you do it at is the important part, rather than just the distance.

Say 100 miles in 5 hours on a bike or a marathon in 3 hours.

ai_1

Running and cycling simply aren't directly comparable.
Running is higher intensity, you get no breaks and is there is an impact element.
Cycling allows some opportunities to vary your position and effort by moving around on the bike, taking advantage of drafting opportunities, descending, etc. You can even freewheel for a few moments if you must without destroying your whole rhythm. However cycling events are usually much longer and because the bike supports you and allows you to slow down without stopping it in some ways allows you to punish yourself more.

I haven't run a marathon (maybe next year) but I have done a half marathon, lots of sportives, duathlons and adventure races. I simply couldn't say X amount of running is as hard as Y amount of cycling. I've occasionally used 1km running = 3.5km cycling as a rule of thumb but honestly that doesn't really work. They're just different!
During duathlons and adventure races when I'm pushing hard and really hurting on the bike I can't wait to switch to running and when I'm hurting on the run I can't wait to switch back to the bike. In the balance I would probably say cycling is a little more forgiving but that's about all you can say.

jgsi

No compare.com the disciplines are just 2 different .
riding out to a race for 12 miles, then 60 miles at race pace, then 12 miles back home.. I hurt, but was not broken
Trying to do the same in a marathon?
3 miles jog in, 26 miles full on, 3 miles back home? doesnt bear even thinking about.

napoleond

I agree with the 'no comparison' school of thought.
The rigours of a marathon on the body are far more than you'd ever get on a road bike. Maybe a 100 mile off road mountain bike ride would be approaching it.

PerformingMonkey

I have run a sub four hour marathon. The closest I have come to the "destroyed" feeling I experienced at the finish line of that whilst on a bike was while tackling the South Downs Way in a day (just over 100miles off road). Nothing on the road has come close yet but the furthest I have cycled in one on road session is 111miles.

Agree with the comments above that it is hard to compare though as there is little opportunity to cruise while running and the impact on the body is very different.

Mikey23

Have done nine london marathons in the past with a best time of 3.15. Usually finished on my knees and walked around like a zombie for a couple of days. The last six miles have always been excruciatingly painful. By contrast in this years ride london i finished at speed, waving and smiling and within half an hour was ready to ride back to the start and no ill effects. Just no comparison...

bobmcstuff

The type of knackered you get from a long day in the saddle is just nothing like the type of knackered you get from running. Cycling is more of a deep tired to the bones feeling whereas running your entire body goes. At least for me anyway.

diy

Distance isn't that important - its about the climb and the time. I took a couple of marathon runners on an off road event a while back it was 100m, 12,000+ ft climb south downs way they were both finished before the 65 mile mark despite training for the event. Both had done decent times on the marathon.

4 hours is the most popular marathon time for men, I reckon you'd be going some to do 85 road miles with any amount of decent climb in the same time. The most popular time for the SDW is around 12 hours riding time. I've done some toughish road events (devil in the downs, legs of steel etc) and the wear on your body is all about the time you do it in.

I'm crap at running but I reckon I could do it 6 hours without any training. I doubt I'd ever get to under 4 hours.

LinkD

I still think nothing compares to a 2k ergo test.

norvernrob

I work with a woman ranked around 300 in Britain for Marathons. I knew she did a bit of cycling too, and last weekend she was booked onto the 65 Roses Holme Moss Classic, as we were.

Anyway it turns out her longest ride before that was 40 miles, but she kept with us for the whole 65 mile, 6,000ft of elevation, averaging about 15mph (including feed stops). We finished around 100 out of 400 riders, and her Strava was a sea of trophies. I got bored of counting, but she got something approaching 50 top 10's and a couple of QOM.

She doesn't do a great deal of cycling so it's fair to say her Marathon running fitness crossed over pretty well!

napoleond

I work with a woman ranked 299th in Britain for Marathons. I took her for a ride and she said she'd never known anything like it and I am the utter King of QuadPower(tm).

BenderRodriguez

It all partly depends on what you mean by 'hard'.

I have done quite a bit of running as well as bike racing in my time, and even a relatively short road race generally involves more 'into the red' suffering than even a marathon. Yes, at times you get a chance to recover a little in a road race, but this also means that you can dig so much deeper as well. When climbing in road races I have at times dug so deep that I have started to get tunnel vision. However, in my experience, when running pacing is everything and if you don't run well within yourself for the majority of a running event, even a 10K, then you are going to end up going slower than you could have by the end, and you really have to avoid going 'into the red'. For example, I found that, in a 10K running event, going out just 15 seconds per km above my ideal pace, which was hardly even noticeable in terms of how much 'harder' it felt, would see me finishing in a slower time than I otherwise would have. Similarly, I have often read that if you are aiming to do a good marathon and you start to suffer before the 20 mile point, then you have already blown it.

If, when talking about 'hardness', we mean the impact the event has on the body, then running is 'harder', due to the impact on the joints and so forth. However, even here a big part of the problem is that too many people expect to be able to run for hours on end without ever giving their bodies a chance to adapt to a high mileage. Add running on tarmac surfaces, the excess weight that most people carry, even the 'fit', and the way so many people's running style falls to pieces when they begin to tire, then it is no wonder that many people can hardly walk for days after something like a marathon.

Another factor is that it is all too easy to cruise along following wheels when on a bike, kidding yourself that you are going 'hard' when you aren't. Anyone finishing a 100 mile bike ride 'at speed', waving to people and feeling no ill effects half an hour later simply wasn't trying hard enough! They should try staying with a quick group in an Alpine sportive and see how much waving they feel like on the last 1000m plus climb! If you go properly hard for 100 miles on a bike, then it should take at least 3 - 4 days to feel OK again, and even then you probably won't be fully recovered.

BenderRodriguez

NorvernRob wrote:

I work with a woman ranked around 300 in Britain for Marathons. I knew she did a bit of cycling too, and last weekend she was booked onto the 65 Roses Holme Moss Classic, as we were. Anyway it turns out her longest ride before that was 40 miles, but she kept with us for the whole 65 mile, 6,000ft of elevation, averaging about 15mph (including feed stops). We finished around 100 out of 400 riders, and her Strava was a sea of trophies

So, competitive marathon running performance is comparable with 1) riding round a glorified 65 mile club run at just 15 Mph, and 2) Strava times, most of which will be set by fat punters?

Now if you had said that she entered, say, an open 50 mile time trial and finished in the top 25% of the field (which would probably need a time of about 1 hour 55) then the comparison might be a little more valid.

P.s. If you were just trying to make the point that her running fitness meant that she had the basic aerobic endurance needed to average 15 Mph on a bike, then fair enough, but in my view basic aerobic fitness is very generalised in any case. For example, when all I was doing was riding a bike, I did the occasional running event with friends who were into running for a bit of fun. On one occasion, on the back of no more than 2, 30 minute 'training' runs I managed a sub 1 hour 25 half marathon, which was faster than all my 'club' running mates managed.

phreak

Surely it depends on the effort that you put into it rather than any kind of distance? That seems applicable to any sport you can think of.

When swimming for instance, doing a hard 100m butterfly was just as hard as doing a 1500m freestyle. Whatever the event, your aim is usually to reach the end with very little left.

Whether it's a sprint or an endurance event, that isn't going to change, is it?

BenderRodriguez

phreak wrote:

Surely it depends on the effort that you put into it rather than any kind of distance? That seems applicable to any sport you can think of.

Exactly, for their current level of fitness most people seem to go too easy when riding a bike, and too hard when running, and then naturally think that running must be harder!

Truth is, given enough miles in the legs it is quite possible to run for 10 -15 miles at a steady pace and to feel hardly any after-effects from this. Many distance runners think little of running 50 - 70 miles a week, but they have the miles in their legs needed to do this without (too frequent) injury.

Personally, I find that the perceived 'hardness' of an event increases exponentially with the intensity needed. I love long, 'hardish' efforts (around maximal lactate steady state) but hate those full-on 100% efforts that seem leave your whole body in pain. In those terms perhaps the 'hardest' event is the 1 Km, standing start time trial. I dread to think what doing one in 56.3 seconds feels like, which is the current world record held by François Pervis.

RChung

Here is a comparison of the swim, bike, and run (and overall) times for the Ironman Championship Triathlons in Kona in 2009 and 2010. As you may know, the swim is 2.3 miles in open water, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, followed by a full 26.2 mile marathon. The axes are hours, and each dot represents the times for a particular athlete on two of the three disciplines.

These a triathletes who have qualified for the championships, so they're not novices -- neither are they world-class in any particular one of the disciplines. However, they must parcel out their effort so that they can complete all three legs, so one can argue that they try to "even out" their effort between them. That said, you can see that there is considerable spread in the comparisons: some triathletes are clearly better in one discipline than in the others.




I've taken the 2010 data and zoomed in on the bike-run leg, then standardized them so you could compare a 40 km cycling time to a 10 km running time. That's below. You could interpret that to say that (on the type of courses used for the Ironman championships, i.e., flat but typically pretty windy), running a 10 k in 40 minutes is roughly equivalent to riding a 40 k in an hour. That single dot way to the right and quite low is someone who took a long long time on the bike but ran very fast. That dot near 70 minutes on the x-axis but above 100 minutes on the y-axis is someone who biked fast but ran very slow. Notice that there is a great deal of scatter but that people who are fast in one discipline are, overall, fast in the other. The bivariate correlation between cycling and running in this race was about 0.77.

BenderRodriguez

I must admit that I don't really know what conclusions can be drawn from those graphs, but the suggestion that beating the hour for 25 miles on a bike demands a similar aerobic capacity to beating 40 minutes for a 10 km run does seem to be about right.

Anyhow, I think the fact that the plenty of people have run a marathon a day for a year or more, and even the relative lardy and non-athletic Eddie Izzard managed to run 43 marathons in 52 days should do something to debunk the idea that the marathon is some sort of ultimate physical challenge. After all, for the elite a marathon is a sub 2 and a quarter hour effort and even a decent club runner shouldn't take much more than an hour longer.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009 ... harity-run

It is also worth considering just how much longer people can run for when properly trained for the effort, and the sort of ground they can cover. Just look at ultra-trail running which is a mass participation sport here in France, with the Ultra Trail Mont Blanc being a pretty much non-stop run of 166 - 168 km with more than 9,600m of ascent (32,000 feet) over some pretty gnarly trails. The winner this year did that lot in just 20 hours and 11 minutes!

http://www.ultratrailmb.com/page/1/The_event.html

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xngcig ... 2012_sport

Compared to that, marathon running really is an event for fat punters dressed as chickens!

RChung

BenderRodriguez wrote:

I must admit that I don't really know what conclusions can be drawn from those graphs, but the suggestion that beating the hour for 25 miles on a bike demands a similar aerobic capacity to beating 40 minutes for a 10 km run does seem to be about right.

I think the main conclusions are that 1) one *can* compare running and cycling efforts, though there is a lot of scatter in the relationship; 2) the scatter means that it doesn't make much sense to point to the running or cycling ability of any single person's experience and say that it represents everyone; 3) despite the scatter, it's clear that if you want to make a comparison, you have to take into account not only the pace or effort, but also the terrain and wind -- you can't just say "26.2 miles running is equivalent to X miles cycling."

BTW, those graphs came from a longer more detailed response to the question, "A co-worker and myself are having a friendly bike / run contest. What is a good ratio for miles ridden vs. miles run? I know it depends on pace. But I'm curious what a generally accepted range of ratios might be."

olake92

A quick random guess: a 2hr to 2:30 marathon would presumably be run at around sweetspot, aiming to blow right at the end. How about the exact same on a bike? In terms of aerobic/cardiac stress, that's pretty much the same! Stress on joints etc... no idea! A 200km race wrecks me up nice and good Though I actually found riding 140km on my own at 34.6km/h was almost comparable as there was very little freewheeling.

markwb79

Funny, I had the conversation about possibly running a marathon next month. Having never run before, I was told that I could probably run it, but my body would be f**ked afterwards - Because I havent trained my body for it.

But on the other side, I know people that have completed marathons and then trained two days later.

I think that more people treat a marathon as a race as you are in your own world for most of it. So comparing that to a cyclo isnt really the same thing in my opinion.

Compare it to a road race where after 90 minutes you just cant push your legs hard enough to even 'free wheel' behind someone.

So I agree that its nothing to do with distance, but more about intensity.

3 hours cycling in Holland (with no hills to go down) at your absolute maximum could be hell and 60km, or 120km. Its still 3 hours at your maximum.