Desk Cycle Bike Race

A buddy of mine at work purchased a Fit Desk Under desk Elliptical trainer. You may recall another buddy of mine (Chad Bisher) has one and uses it to illegally win FitiBit Workweek Hustle challenges. Anyway, intrigued I wanted to try it out when it arrived.

I immediately determined this is something I'd like to purchase. As luck would have it Chad Bisher's wife, the doc, had purchased a Desk Cycle but rarely used it and was willing to sell it to me.

I quickly installed it and got it adjusted to my work area and started pedaling. Of course in true thejoestory fashion I was not satisfied with merely riding the bike and receiving the health benefits. I quickly challenged my co-worker to a competition. A virtual bike race to various destinations in the world. We will see who can pedal the farthest, the fastest, etc.

Website

Thus the Bikerace website was born.

Our first destination was Chicago from our HQ here in Kansas City. I am not sure why or how I picked Chicago. Anyway we started tracking metrics: Miles, Time, Calories burned. Progress to the goal was displayed on the site.

I decided to use the bootstrap framework for this site. I have been using foundation a lot and wanted to change things up a bit. Bootstrap has a lot of features to offer. We will see how it goes.

One thing we noticed right away was the difference in speed calculations between the two bikes. The FitDesk seems to measure speed differently. My co-workers speed was registering 5 MPH faster than the Desk Cycle.

We both tried the other person's cycle and the results were similar. Therefore I will add a modifier to my buddy's distance. As you can see in the screenshot...I have ridden over 2 hours more than him and I am only 9 miles ahead of him to Chicago.

Anyway I will tweak the numbers and see how it goes.

Future Plans

I would like to pinpoint where we each rider is located along the route based on miles. I have not figured out how to do that on Google Maps yet. I need to figure out how to do Lat/Long math along a path given a specific bearing. Should be an interesting challenge.

Other than that we just have to come up with where we want to ride next. By the time the Tour de France rolls around we may mimic some of the legs by cranking up the resistance on the bike for the mountain climbs and such. Yes I know it is nothing like the real tour...just something fun to try.