Haha, I remember a thread a year or two ago about what’s gone down over the last few posts. Kind of turned into a unicycling is the best and nothing can touch it! vs. use your head argument. I also remember Joe getting in there… but, anyway, I second Joe. He knows what he’s talking about.
On a road bike, the conditions are so controlled and the choices of gearing are so many and so close that you can dial in exactly the power (literal power, force*distance/time) you need to put out to maintain a constant speed. If you’re diligent enough, you can get a much more intense workout on a road bike than anything else. If you have a higher gear, and you’re complaining that it’s too easy, take the higher gear. You have no excuse not to :).
My argument last time was that, even with a coker, the equivalent gear ratio (or Total Gear Ratio, as someone put it here a while ago) just isn’t high enough to necessitate sufficient FORCE from your legs to give you a workout at sane cadences.
With the geared 36er, that may or may not be true. Just riding on flat ground in high gear, there still isn’t enough gain to give your legs the same workout they’d get on a bike, but the slightest of grades or headwinds will make up the difference. (Sometimes, maybe more than the difference, which lowers your performance in the other direction… too high a gear is just as bad as too low a gear). If I go out riding on my geared 36 into the wind or up SHALLOW grades (steeper grades mean low gear, which is way too easy), I get a pretty darned thorough workout, and I get all the opportunity I need to actually feel like I’m cranking something… but if I’m going with the wind, I decisively still need a bigger gear (maybe 1.8 or 2). Now, because I’m lazy on my bike, I usually end up taking gear choices that give me a workout comparable to or slightly less intense than what I do on my the uni, so the net effect is that I get nearly all my training on my uni now, and hardly ride my bike anymore. If I seriously want to ride hard, I’ll take the bike, but the uni is so much more fun, and is so “close enough” to my bike (in terms of how hard I work) that it’s worth it to take the uni. Also, it makes me ride more because of how much fun it is. So if I ride 90% as hard on average, but twice as much because it’s fun, I end up in better shape! Win/win! That still doesn’t mean a geared 36 is as good a fitness tool as a bike, though. Just means I should be riding harder than I actually am. :-/