I went for a bike ride this morning, the first real bike ride of the year (I’ve biked to and from work a couple of times, but this was the first real ride just for the sake of riding). There was some pissy drizzle at the start, but by the time I got on the bike path headed for Lock 8, the sun came out, and it was a cool, pleasant, calm spring morning.<\/p>\n
As I was tooling down the path, I realized that I had the bike one gear higher than I usually do on that stretch of path, but I didn’t feel like I was working any harder than normal. “Gee, I guess I’m in better shape than I thought…” I said to myself.<\/p>\n
Then I reached Lock 8, and turned around.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It turns out, I’m in just about exactly the shape I thought I was. What I was wrong about was the “calm” part of the weather description. There was actually a very steady wind blowing, that had been at my back the whole time (blowing from east to west, which is a little unusual, and why it hadn’t occurred to me as an explanation). When I turned around, I spent most of the ride back one gear lower<\/strong> than usual for that stretch of path.<\/p>\n So there’s today’s lesson on Experimental Physics for Morons: Wind resistance is a significant problem. Particularly if you’re 6’6″, 250 lbs– I’m around half a meter across at the shoulders, and nearly two-thirds of a meter from waist to shoulder, meaning that on a mountain bike, I’m like a giant goddamn sail.<\/p>\n Or, to be quantitative, the drag force on me is:<\/p>\n Fdrag<\/sub> = -0.5 ρ D(0.3m2<\/sup>)v2<\/sup><\/i> = One bike gear<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I went for a bike ride this morning, the first real bike ride of the year (I’ve biked to and from work a couple of times, but this was the first real ride just for the sake of riding). There was some pissy drizzle at the start, but by the time I got on the… Continue reading What a Drag<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n