Re: optimal gearing - is there such thing ?
- From: Ryan Cousineau <rcousine@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:29:53 GMT
In article
<3bae0d40-bd5d-46e8-9f7b-85289de9a47b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Woland99 <woland99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 27, 11:01 pm, Dan O <danover...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Let's say there is. You plug in the values, run the formulas, find
the optimum gearing, and set it up.
Then you get out on the course, and feel like you can't push the
gears. Turns out your mojo is off a tad that day - or whatever. So
you go back to the trailer, and set about having your team physician
and engineers recalculate your ability to produce wattage, or which
way the wind is blowing, or some such stuff, fire up the ENIAC in the
trailer and run the numbers again...
Well - if you are like Lance Armstrong then you often train several
times on same on rge same route before the race. So there is some
potential to experiment with gears. Regarding your current "mojo" -
I would expect that team doctors have some ways to assess your current
ability. Even without riding the stage several times you can use
some of those high end trainers to simulate exact resistance.
And yes - writing such software would be complicated - since it
might have to take into account the need for eg. responding to
attacks - in general you need some flexibility beyond just
minimizing time. But for time trial situation it should be rather
straightforward task... - wind eth can be predicted. Dunno about
"gears you train with" factor - do people really get that dependent
on the feel that certain chainring/cassette give them? My own
experience in swapping gears is zero so I cannot answer that.
Anyways - it probably is academic type of problem - but I remember
that Tim Krabbe in "The Rider" describes the scene before the race
where one of riders is fiddling with cogs trying to decide which
ones to choose for the race. That is an old book - was published
in 1978 - so I was just curious if that sort of decisions are done
more scientifically now.
Tim's friend was agonizing over his cog-box because he could only carry
five (or six?) ratios, and it was going to be a hilly race, and because
his chainrings up front would have been closely spaced by modern
standards, or about the same (52/39?), more or less, and he wasn't
sporting a triple.
To an extent, it may still have been the historic equivalent of worrying
about whether to run 110 or 120 psi, owing to the rain.
Nowadays, pros have about twice as many cogs out back, and thus any
"mistakes" are less problematic. I think the decisions are no more
scientific, though pros have a pretty solid metric for gearing choices:
they know their preferred cadence for various forms of effort, so if
they know what their speeds will be (more or less) on the course, they
can choose gears to suit it.
These days, I think that most pros have their road gearing and their TT
gearing, and don't adjust them from race to race much (though TT gearing
more so than road gearing), with an exception for very hilly/slow races,
where these days the hot setup is compact.
--
Ryan Cousineau rcousine@xxxxxxxxx http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."
.
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