triathletes are SO aero!

One cannot help but feel some pity for those dumb enough to be drawn into the Tri-guy ruse on Wednesday. Collectively, the number of hours spent reading and writing all that blather borders on criminality, in that it was such a waste of time which might have been spent otherwise. Even whipping the bishop would have a better use daylight.

But enough of that.

In other news, Brittany has been sporting the bearded clam around town this week (sans culottes) a sure sign that its not quite cold enough yet to switch to the heavyweight Under-Armour and booties. Global warming is bad for the planet, I know, but quite good for cycling in NYC.

Question: Why is it that I can effectively and completely execute the snot-rocket nasal-clearing maneuver on one side, but on the other it always seems to wind up on jersey and thigh? Anyone else have this problem?

Soooo….51 shots. Hmmm. Prima facie, this seems a bit excessive. But I wasn’t there, and neither were you. One thought strikes here. Don’t leave a dodgy strip club at 3am, climb in your auto and slam it into an unmarked police van. But how could he know it was unmarked police van you ask? OK fair point, so lets just not slam into anything then. Drunk driving kills, one way or another.

That’s all for now.

V.

The Pro tour seems dead…

The representatives of six national cycling federations (Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy and Luxembourg) have met on Thursday, November 30 in Paris and officially declared their opposition to the UCI ProTour "in its current form."

Does anyone care?

Does anybody care about Luxembourg at all?

Dammit, where is Coach L and Tri Guy when you need them to get things fired up?

I like The Vulgarian

That was a good post

I became a cyclist because triathalons bore me.

on to mountain biking!

I don’t know why you guys bash triathletes, they get to ride the coolest bikes and wear the coolest outfits. Who wouldn’t want to ride a fully tricked-out Alsop or softride with aero bars and all the fixin’s.

Also, all the best cycling-related innovations have come out from tri’s – who do you think came up with the bar-mounted waterbottle with the straw that goes up to your mouth, camelpacks, bottle cages on your seat, bento-boxes, sleeveless jerseys, the list goes on and on.

Tell us we have lemons in our pussies if you want but chicks are way more impressed with us than you silly road racers. Who cares about what’s harder, it’s what sounds harder that counts!!!

hey, tri guy, i bet even the tri chicks care about what’s harder when they are in bed rather than what sounds harder…

Thoughtless comment 1 –

The UCI’s days are #’rd – I predict next season the Grand Tours tell the Pro-tour to go stuff it!! How can cycling weather another season without the big players? No Vino in the mix!? C’mon he won the Vuelta and the other shoe hasnt dropped without scandel. The Continental/Pro – Pro tour barriers are friggen stupid and should be done away with or fixed.

Nice work Joel – I may follow your lead on the bike storage thing. I’m too busy these days to get any side stuff done.

I wanted to remind everyone that Schmaltz drafted Sarah when he won the Ladies Sprint Cup two weeks ago. I’d like to see another rematch . . . best of 5.

Thanks for coming back Lee3. You complete us.

Tri guy is not anyone person but a way of life. A colorful life of dorky bikes, bravado and three-sported mediocrity.

which tri guy wasn’t the original tri guy?

more importantly, if a triathlete falls off his bike going into the transition area… …does anyone care?

I DEMAND TO KNOW WHO THIS IMPOSTER IS.

I would stick around to argue about how tri’s are better than cycling, but I have to get to my waxing appointment to get my Mangina taken care of. cause there’e nothing less aero than a tri-geek’s pubes popping out of his mankini.

ADM is there gonna be any Bandit wine bar offerings @ Spillage? I wont be hittin any beer. Do they make a Merlot?

lee, are you afraid you’ll spill beer on your mankini?

My wheels are like-a a pizzapie, my bars are like-a bucatini, my bento box-a are full-a cannoli for energy.

those are all very legitimate points (re: the need for power training). . .

I decided to get into power after spending a few days here reading about it. I had been out of the sport for a long, long time and was trying to decide how best to "catch up." So my situation was a special case.

But after deciphering all the arcane and unfathomable terms, I came to a very simple conclusion: with so many good riders out there sharing their numbers, it’s a no-brainer. They were literally giving me all the information I needed to determine if I could still keep up . . for free! It seemed like a revelation to me at the time. I already knew from past experience that in this sport you can easily waste a whole year on trial and error alone, so the cost of the PowerTap seemed small in that light.

But you’re right: the endless fiddling around with the gadgetry often seems like its own flavor of time-consuming foolishness. You’re still going to come crashing up against the limits of your age and natural abilities anyway (which for most are going to be about 75-100 watts below what the best local riders can sustain).

But those numbers are cool: whether you can crack ’em or no, they do represent a goal. I respect riders for sharing those numbers. It’s like the gauntlet has been thrown down, now see if you’re up to it kind of thing. It also expands the intellectual interest greatly in terms of discovering just what the physiological possibilities are, so there’s a kind of hobbiest appeal in that sense.

Well, better sign off before I kill another fun thread. . .

G.G.

hey….nobody likes a beer smellin noony!!

I know that I’m like packfill now who always shouts at the guys at the front to counter break attempts but please guys, if we carry on this way I would need to start working and I would like to avoid that on a Friday. Pretty much like on Wednesdays. Anyone?? Haters??

you’ve got one, don’t you? (oh, that’s right you can’t hear in that plastic tent, can you?) Look for this on Hate, Vol. 23

g.g.

and all those other acronyms always make my eyes glaze over, kind of like Jim Friel’s training bible. . . but I do think a pro tour is a useful way to expand the fan base beyond the usual handful of pot-bellied Belgians standing on the roadside at the spring classics. . .

Andy, could you do something about all the damn foreigners on this site?

The foreigners and triathletes need to get their own site.

Who is bigpoppa52?

Lee3 – – I’m pretty sure there will be some Bandit goodies at the Spillage. I’ll make sure we have a Merlot for you, but if you wear the mankini I won’t let you have it. I’m going to punch you in the nuts instead.

Chris, for me, the advantage of the power meter is that it improves the quality of your workouts. Pre PM my intervals would start out at 400+ watts and peter out to 150. I’d think I was doing good work since it hurt a lot. With a PM you can hold the correct wattage for the duration of your interval.

Powermeters give you one more gauge to watch when you train and race. One very useful thing about a training w/ a powermeter is being able to look at intervals from effort to effort and see how your power compares and where it starts to drop off. Its great for doing hill repeats you can see exactly when your power starts to drop off and you know when to stop. Doing them based on PE doesn’t give you a very accurate read of this. I have tested it and found that some days I will feel terrible and my power is still there and I have several more intervals in me. Other days I will feel great, but my power will be falling off.

You certainly don’t need a powermeter to train, but that doesn’t make them a useless tool.

Oh, and triathletes suck.

Ray sucks.

Ray sucks.

Just wanted to say a swell time was had by all at Spin last night. Thanks again to Alex for posting our flyer and thanks to all who came out. The next one will probably be in January, perhaps in Brooklyn…

"The 2007 Giro d’Italia will kick off May 12 with a team time trial on the island of Caprera, ascend the feared Monte Zoncolan – a 10.1km ascent with an average gradient of 17 percent – and finish in Milan on June 3, organizers announced Saturday in Milan."

Over 6 miles at 17 percent. Wow.

"150 psi for others and even higher for tubulars (200++). I think this is the key performance diff, as the higher psi tires are clearly going to roll easier than a less hard tire surface."

Not unless the road is perfectly smooth.

http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html#rolling

happy, nice comments have no place on this website.

Power Meters:

post says " a good workout should leave the rider feeling about the same whether using a HR or Power tap, right? "

Well not really, that’s the difference between physical stress and mental stress.

Your heart rate can be elevated but your power reduced due to all sorts of factors. So that poses the question of is your training well targeted becuase your HR is in the right zone even though your power is lacking? If the winner of the race was the guy who had the highest or lowest HR at the end of the race this sort of training would be great, but this is a sport dicated by power ( not entirely but to a large extent ) so the guy who can hold the highest power for the longest time will usually win.

Training soley with HR you are subject to different factors which can be misleading, such as half life, cardiac drift, dehaydration, heat etc. but with power watts are watts. Having said all that a good coach can calculate all this in to a HR based training program.

Do you need a power meter to train? absolutley not. Is it a useful training metric? totally. Can it make your training more focussed and help you identify your weaknesses and work on them more efficiently? without doubt. Will it make you a better racer? sorry, there are no silver bullets.

From a purely analytical stand point training with power & heart rate is better than just training with HR, however if you don’t knonw how to use the numbers and convert those in to a training program that brings results a power meter is just a really expensive bike computer.

Tires:

Rolling resistance is not entirely defined by tire pressure. Max pressure for a lot of clincher manufactures is defined by the fact that they are clinchers and as wheel manufactures make lighter and lighter wheels the possibility of tire pressure collapsing the rim wall if quite high so that’s part of the equation.

Another part of the equation is the shape of the tire and how well it holds that shape, under difference directional forces. Tubs are made to be very round and do not deform as much under direction forces ( cornering, sprinting etc. ) Because of the way a clincher must grip the rim with it’s bead the shape cannot be as uniform as a tub and a lot of this is what dicates the ride quality.

The weight differnce is really not an issue. I’d rather have a tire that didn’t puncture and got me to the end of a race, than a light tire that helped bring my bike under the UCI weight limit.

OK, so all interesting and legit posts, but how do we define "better" for a tire then? Ive used 150 psi race tires to great effect, and recently have tried another manufacturer and noticed only after buying that they recommend only 120 psi. I bought it so decided to use it anyway… Assuming both will stay on the rim (neither has collapsed or anything…), and forgetting ride quality (we’re talking speed here…), is the higher psi tire better or not? Im tempted to think so, but since the 120 psi tire is from a big intnl maker that could certainly afford to design a higher psi product, I must be missing something key here. The harder tire does feel harder, and I assume must be giving better rolling resistence performance, no? What gives???

Also, do the pros all use tubulars still, or do they sometimes use clinchers? I sort of assume they use tubulars for the lower weight, higher psi and smoother ride – esp since they get a hired hand to mount and change them!

quality tubulars have a much nicer feel when riding than clinchers. they are considered superior racing tires for a number of reasons but as for pure speed, they allow you to run greater pressure w/o sacrificing handling. Taking a high speed corner on a nice tubular at 140 psi is fairly safe and you feel more contact/grip with the road. taking the same corner on continental gp 4000 clincher at 140psi is a nice way to end up in the bushes

I mean, don’t ride clinchers, don’t use a power meter.

Solid additional points. Its true I’ve had issues at times with wheel skip when sprinting, and this is more pronounced on the high psi tires (though compounded by my body position too far forward). Not sure about the tradeoff though between the long dist on that tire vs the issue in the sprint – Id rather be confident that Im not hampered for the other 99% of the race by too much rolling resistence. Still, I see your point about the tradeoff of power transfer at least for the moments of high torque. Thanks for the elaboration…

The tire discussion is interesting, but at our level races are won on fitness, brains or guile. Tires don’t matter.

I agree with adm. Rolling resistance is hardly worth worrying about. The most important issue with race tires is how well they grip in corners. If you’re putting 150 psi in your tires at a crit (no matter what the claimed max psi is), you’re not making yourself any faster. All you’re doing is increasing your odds of crashing and taking others down with you.

To jonathon – – generally yes. I’ve flatted out off a lot of races that i might have done well in. "Might" being the operative word. It’s very hard to catch back on if you flat. Last year I only saw two guys do it. Badger did it at Palmer in the 35+ (on the last lap) and ended up with a top 10, and some guy (whose name I forget) did it at Bear Mtn (Fall) in the Cat 3 field and ended up with a top 5. Both of those guys were very strong and the race played to their favor. But it’s generally very hard to do it. When you flat at our level, it’s usually time to go home. So much of cycling is based on luck, you may as well put the odds in your favor a bit by riding a tire that is flat-resistant.

Tire selection in mountain bike racing is highly strategic and can make a huge difference. Pressure, sticky v firm compound, knob height, tread pattern, and tire width. Add to that tube v tubeless. Off road, tubeless tires allow for much lower pressure and better traction without pinch flatting. I’ve read about tubeless road tires. Where is that technology now, and is there any advantage?

Interesting stuff, like this one

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?post=1095120;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;guest=9983259

Coach L, maybe you could help Lisa Michele out?

Lurker – – Like I said, it’s an interesting discussion. My dismissiveness has nothing to do with the length of the discussion on this page. This is a subject people have discussed among themselves for ages. I personally think it’s hard to win a race if you’ve flatted on your ultra-light, ultra-fast, over-inflated tire.

To "someone you may know" – – didn’t mean to offend. I’m sure there are plenty of other guys (yourself included) who’ve caught back on, but I’ve been particularly unsuccessful at it. Good wheel support is key, as is being either (1) really fast (which I’m not) or (2) fortunate enough to flat at a slower or flatter part of the race (which I haven’t been). I now just try to avoid flats (nothing novel there) at the risk of being on a marginally slower tire.

Only time I’ve ever heard a pro blast a sponsor in an interview was when Van Petegem said that when he was on Mercury the bikes were awful and the tires they rode at Roubiax slipped all over the place and prevented them from being competitive. Feel free to investigate for yourself which bikes and tires he was talking about.

Listen up "Tri-Guy", I was there from the first mankini to the TT bikes at interbike. My Cervelo P3 is gold plated and worth over $30K, and I can average almost 19mph for at least 1hr. I set a PR last year at Mooseman. I also gave you pathetic cyclists the link to slowtwitch.com. Need I prove myself more????

-TG

ps: Look out 2007, I’ll be spending all winter doing one legged intervals on my computrainer. I’ll be over 19mph for sure.

Tri-Guy’s gotta train HARD!!! No time or space for tourists. My aerobars cut through tourists like a hot knife through butter…wait, 30mph??

That wasn’t a tri-guy, everyone knows we only go 19mph, max.

-TG