• trying to lift off with the flaps on
• sprinting in knee deep water
• walking in quick sand
• drag racing with the hand brake on
• playing tennis at the beach

What else can you think of that approximates the sensation of biking in wind? The whole concept of a vehicle on wheels is that you apply energy to the system, whereby the mechanism propels that into kinetic energy, which yields momentum (the product of velocity and mass). Once momentum is obtained, friction permitting (air resistance included), it will allow the vehicle to travel at constant velocity indefinitely. In ideal conditions, friction is such that a bicycle will slowly decelerate, at a rate of [negative] acceleration a fraction that of the [positive] acceleration, which set it in motion in the first place. In English, that means you pedal hard for 10m and you roll for 60m or 100m. Now, in the case of wind, especially wind hitting you from the front (actually, speaking in terms of aerodynamics, it may be the case that diagonal wind [from the front] is trapped by a greater area of body, which imposes greater friction), the obtained momentum will decrease more rapidly. The result is that the energy applied yields much smaller gain in terms of motion. Now, in a psychological context, this breaks with the assumption that biking is an efficient process, thus causing trauma. See, the beauty of the wheel is that of playing on dynamic friction (which is much smaller than static friction). Ie. it takes more effort to set something in motion than it does to sustain that motion. When you’re walking, taking one step will get you exactly one step forward. If you push a big rock forward, it will go forward exactly the distance you push it. But if you push a shopping cart in the supermarket, it will roll on wheels and travel much further than a rock to which you apply the same amount of energy (try this experiment next time you go shopping, it’s very instructive!). Let’s repeat: dynamic friction. But in conditions of strong wind, the magnitude of dynamic friction approaches the magnitude of static friction, rendering biking no more efficient than walking. Of course, it never actually happens that these two quantities take on the same magnitude, but consider that when walking the energy applied is proportional to your mass. But when biking, you are also moving the bike itself, so it actually takes more energy. When you then experience strong dynamic friction, the benefit of being on a bike falls away, rendering the whole experience very traumatic.

Goddamn flat land. Put up some mountains to trap the wind already!

As an exercise for next week, perhaps you could figure out why stopping at traffic lights at every intersection is greatly traumatic and impeding to the concept of biking?

Finally, if you think all of this theory sounds somewhat familiar, you may suggest the possibility that it is simply high school physics, in which case you would be absolutely correct. And that leads me to a big shout out to Nawaf, who is currently learning all this fascinating material by way of a nice booklet of physics formulae and a calculator to compute all these exciting quantities.