Speed Racer

When biking to and from work I’m using my beloved Garmin Forerunner 305 to harvest miles. The only real reason for this is to see if I’m able to get more miles under my wheels than I did last year, something that won’t happen this years since the distance to and from work is a lot shorter. I’m not much of a biker, you see. Tried to keep up with Hans Olav once, didn’t really make it.

Anyway. Every now and then I sync the Forerunner with my computer to look at the statistics. Here’s the speed graph from a random trip (click to enlarge).

Garmin graph showing a speed of 377 kilometer per hour on my bike.
I really want to go to work.

At 6:51, the Forerunner has clocked me at a massive 377 km/h (234 mph). I’m guessing the most probably explanation for this is that I’m riding through a few tunnels and this confuses the Forerunner a bit. Because I didn’t really ride my bike at 377 km/h. That’s insanely fast. Β At 377 km/h I would be moving 105 meters per second and would get from our apartment to the office in a little over 32 seconds. For comparison the takeoff speed of an Airbus A380 is 280 km/h (174 mph) at normal circumstances. Biking at that speed would of course be nice, but I suspect air resistance would have its way with me long before I reach 377 km/h. Maybe some MATLAB geeks can do the math.


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