Originally Posted by hubcyclist

As someone pretty familiar with the OP's town, when I think of the paved roads there, they are generally 4 lanes with 45-55mph speed limits, and shoulders have rumble strips and lots of debris. For a road cyclist, it's not a very welcoming environment. Coming from the Boston area where a lot of suburban roads are limited to 35mph, riding on the road here is (in my view) less daunting than riding on Nebraska roads. I can see why someone would want to ride for fitness on the MUPs in Lincoln. While it isn't far to go to gravel roads, not everyone is equipped for gravel riding, plus the gravel roads there are reeeeaallly rolling (as I experienced 12k ft of climbing over 150miles of Nebraska gravel) so not exactly great for steady workouts. My go to ride following my gravel event was a flat gravel MUP near my in-laws'

I guess a side effect of using cycling to exercise is that you get to a point where you have to go faster as a baseline because anything under the baseline barely registers as exercise. I do my workouts at home in the basement (90-120mins), but lately after I do I've taken my 9 y/o to local paths and do another 2hrs at 10mph, which for me is a total recovery ride and I could probably do all day. So I'd have to be in the 16-17mph range to have it actually start qualifying as "exercise" on a flat path. When the average path user is probably at 10mph and below, I can see how that may appear to be like "racing" but it's not. While there are behaviors I personally wouldn't do (passing in the middle between traffic) I think more fitness driven types and more casual folks can coexist without having this whole us vs them stuff that OP likes to perpetuate here