How much Horsepower you have man?

 Today it’s easy to forget how incredible automobiles are. Like the Iron Man’s suit these machines give us abilities that exceed the limits of our flesh and bone. Yet we don’t think of our cars or bikes as anything special. We take them for granted. I look contemptuously at 7 bhp scooters – categorise them as tame runabouts. Anything to be worthy of respect needs to have at least 30bhp on two-wheels and around 100bhp in cars. That’s my internal scale. Yours might be different. For instance, serious respect/fear is commanded by 100/350bhp at the very least.

Ask any motorcyclist what he loves so much about being on a bike – he’ll say “Freedom!” That freedom, at least partly, is the freedom from the physical limitations of the body. Usain Bolt’s fastest been clocked doing 37.5kph over 100 metres. On a bike, we all know how much faster and how much longer we can keep going.  Your bike makes you a SuperSomething. That’s the Power of BHP. The same applies to cars. It is just that, in a car, the sensation is a bit muted and not quite as immediate and satisfying as on a motorcycle. With your super power you can flatten slopes, re-define distances and your own abilities .

We find more ways of enjoying our super-abilities. Weekend rides are quite popular with bikers. Hilly sections are the most satisfying. That’s because when you get to the top the sense of achievement is similar to what you would feel if you would have trudged all the way to the top on your own two feet. Then one day, my nephew who is an avid cyclist (he puts in more kilometres training on his Orbea every morning than I commute by car/bike in a day) asked me, “What do you get out of it?” I gave him the whole shebang about man and machine, finding the limits and controlling the power of the machine. He didn’t seem to get any of it (he doesn’t have a drivers/riders license yet) and dismissed me as a polluting looney bin.

But the thing is that I also cycle and understand where he’s coming from. To climb those hills using personal horsepower tests your commitment and ability completely. The first trip ensured that my appreciation for every BHP generated by even the ordinary 7-bhp-machines went up exponentially. You stop thinking of that power as just a silly tap that you can turn on and off. Every time a bike passed me, its throttle snapped all the way back, the rider trying to eke an extra kph out of the already strained motorcycle, I promised myself that I would never do that, again. Suddenly I could empathise with the machine. On that day and on subsequent rides, one question would loom in my mind - how much horsepower do I make?

Somewhere in there you'll find your BHP count.

Well, the answer came to me at the gym this morning. Hop on to one of those elliptical trainers or cycles and pedal away as furiously as you want. Most of the new gym equipments have a display for energy being generated– it’s shown in Watts. Make a mental note of that. To convert it to BHP just multiply the number by 0.0013. The elliptical trainer depressed me a fair bit as it showed a peak output of 38W which equals 0.0494bhp (low intensity warm up phase)! I felt a lot better when I upped the intensity on the cycling machine.  I registered a peak output of 188W (briefly)– which equals to a dazzling 0.244bhp!
All I know is  every time I get on my bike I’m going to enjoy every BHP, no matter how little.


Image source: BMW K1600GT from Autocarindia.com & Exercise machine display from Lifefitness.com