Comparing cycling to running...again

I go back and forth about what it is I want to do with my cardio. For the most part I feel like any cardio, no matter how you get it, is good cardio, but I also don't like to be in pain if I can help it while also not wanting to fall into the trap of doing whatever is easiest.

I think we can all agree that due to the technological advantages of a bicycle with a bunch of gears on it, that it will always have the tendency to be significantly easier than running is but I think the lack of real impact also makes it a lot simpler. Also, it's kind of up to me how hard I am going to work, isn't it?

Some explanation is necessary here: I was actually running a great deal faster than this but was interrupted twice while on my run because I ran into some people I know and had short chats. My actual pace when running was around 7 mins / km but with some breaks in there for the chats.

Now purely from a caloric point of view this isn't that bad and isn't that great. It was close to 50 minutes and lets go ahead and say that it was only really around 35-40 minutes because of the breaks. So it is efficient.

Running is harder for me and gets my heart rate normally in the 4-5 zone range.

You can see the two drops there at the start. I don't normally run into people I know when running.. but it was one of those days. My BPM stayed pretty consistent once I had no distractions and that makes me happy because that is kind of the idea. I don't want to red-line and burn out, I want to stay in orange or yellow zone (zone 3-4) as much as possible and stay out of zones 1,2, and 5.

Now let's look at cycling.

Good caloric burn IMO and also I like to do an hour or more of cardio if I can anyway. Cycling just generally speaking is a much more enjoyable experience for me and hell, I don't even listen to music when I am doing it because I tend to ride quite fast and I need to be able to hear to do that safely. When running, I kind of count on the music to keep me motivated.

You can see here that my heart rate remains significantly lower and this is a big part of the reason why it is so much easier for me. Some of the slowdowns were not elective because I live in a very populated city and there are some instances where I have to stop for traffic or a crowded bike trail. That's why I am all over the place with my heart rate on this.

I remember reading somewhere that if caloric burn is your primary concern that staying below in zone 3 or below is ideal and well, except for the few times that I felt mama speed and went to zone 4, that is exactly what I ended up doing, purely by accident.

When I was rating these exercises after the fact as far as difficulty is concerned, I ranked the run as "moderate" and the cycling as "relaxed" and that is genuinely how I feel about both of them in an all-around sense. Cycling to me, is just easier and I probably could have gone even longer but I was back at my house and because I wore the wrong shorts my butt was kind of aching because of my substandard seat on the bike. I should probably look into changing that sooner rather than later.

So what's the take-away from this for me? I think that if I am just looking to burn off excess calories that cycling is the way to go, but if I am training for endurance cycling isn't really going to hack it since I never really end up pushing myself because I can't due to the amount of people that live here.

In the near future I am going to go on a 1 hour run, a very relaxed one probably with plenty of slowdowns or even walking sections and then compare that to the calories burned in an hour with both exercises.

This is of course keeping in mind that my sport watch was just over $100 so the readouts on the thing aren't exactly proven sport science.