Forgot my watch during a bike ride :(

It was one of those days where I got super motivated to go on a long-ish bike ride fulfilling my zone 2 cardio easily and I got downstairs with my bike and was on the street, had my two water bottles attached and had just sat down on the seat ready to rock and looked at my arm and just said "fuck."

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It's funny how me and many other people got this way. It wasn't even that long ago that we didn't even have the ability to do this but these days I kind of feel like the exercise doesn't count unless I have it digitally stored! This is stupid of course but I wasn't going to walk all the way back up to my apartment and leave my bike unattended. One of the major downsides of downtown Chicago is that if you leave basically anything unattended for a little while it isn't going to be there when you get back. I wasn't going to carry it all the way back upstairs either so we were just going to have to do this ride without knowing our heart rate. This is frustrating but not the end of the world.

I did discover something about the app in my phone that accompanies the sportwatch though. It can make a very broad guess at your physical output just by looking at your GPS on your phone.

I do think that this estimate is every more full of crap that the watch is though.

I say this because this ride wasn't what I would consider at all strenuous. I feel as though it was really relaxed because at no point did I hit any hills because there aren't any here in the city. I also couldn't bomb down the path because it was near peak usage time. There are a lot of people out there and if you try to go too fast you are going to be a nuisance or even worse, you are going to crash into some kids.

So I took it easy, didn't really pass all that many people, and just was out for a ride that is slightly more exercise than sitting around and doing nothing. This is why I don't believe that I actually burned 600 active calories.

I never really hit any sort of high speeds either during this except for that one time where the road was straight and surprisingly free of people in front of me on the lakeside so I legged it in a top gear and got up to 30 which let's be honest, really isn't that fast anyway.

By the end of it I was sweaty because it is summer time, but I never really felt like I pushed myself and therefore I kind of have to call bullcrap on the calorie output on this activity. When I go jogging for an hour I feel much more fatigued than with cycling yet it says that I burn about the same amount of calories. I can only guess why this is but I would imagine that it can't possibly take into account how many gears your bike has on it, or how light it is, or what other sort of technological advantages you have with your bike. My bike isn't great, but it isn't a single gear piece of crap either. When you are on the flats, getting up to 20km/hour isn't really that big of an accomplishment and even though I don't have any idea what my BPM was, it wasn't like I was ever gasping for breath.

So I guess you could say that I am happy that this went into the log anyway even though it can't be trusted. I will not count this towards my calories for the day and will not go nuts and eat an entire large pizza or something. I don't deserve that.

When I look online about how many calories does cycling burn the answer is obviously extremely varied. It says 280-1200 calories per hour. lol. Ok, well I guess my phone was in those ranges. Good job phone!