Machin

I've posted about my "Marginal Gains Calculator" before on a different thread, but I thought I should start a new thread rather than continue to hi-jack that one... it was all getting a bit confusing!

A few suggestions were made by you guys and I've now implemented them:-

I've updated the program so that you can now select metric or imperial on distance, ascent, height and weight.

I have now increased the number of options for you to select to describe your original ride. Not everything is covered, but the majority: you can now choose your position, bike, wheels, tyre width, clothing and helmet.

Happy Cycling!

CYCLE SPEED MARGINAL GAINS CALCULATOR

(If anyone has any more suggestions I'll look at implementing them)

bt

spam

canam73

I don't know, at the very least useful spam. He has been taking suggestions and integrating them into his calculator.

wphamilton

No this is cool and a pretty much on target for 41.

Machin

I'm sorry that you feel that way... I wasn't totally sure it was appropriate to link to external websites myself... If I can take a few moments to explain: Like a lot of other people I wanted to know how much faster "x" would make me on my bike so I wrote a little program and began gathering as much real-life data as I could from scientific papers/reports...

Once I'd written the program and done the research it seemed a waste to keep it to myself so I registered a web domain and put it on the web... it's totally free to use; just fill in your data hit "calculate" and it'll tell you how much faster "x" would make you on your bike over the same ride.

If this is inappropriate please accept my apologies and delete this thread.

DXchulo

Add EPO or a blood transfusion. Altitude training is a nice start.

veloboy971

How about testosterone and then your favorite masking agent to avoid detection?

rpenmanparker 

Two suggestions/questions. Can you add some more variability to the tire/wheel specification so that the effect of wider rims on aero profile can be taken into account, e.g. the improvement when using 23mm rims with 23 mm tires as opposed to 19 mm rims with 25 mm tires? And secondly, is it necessarily true that the individual gains would be additive and not interactive? If one does everything you suggest, does one get the total improvement? It seems to me that riding in the drops, for example, might overlap effects with the 5% decrease in drag. I'm sure there are also other examples. Maybe you could set up check boxes for each improvement. When a user would make a certain group of selections, the modified total effect would be calculated taking the interactions among the choices into account.

Thanks.

njkayaker

It's not technically spam. It is a self-serving (commercial) post since it has ads. There isn't any issue with posting links that you have no interest in (ones that don't profit you). But this link isn't that.

(I'm just explaining what the issue is.)

===============================

Here's a link that does something similar. It has no ads and I have no interest in it.

https://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm

njkayaker

???

It doesn't seem reasonable to expect that a simple calculator would be able to deal with such small and complicated effects (which are not that well understood any way).

You are asking for more than is possible.

rpenmanparker 

I don't disagree. I just wanted to put those ideas on the table and get some comments. If the actual composite effect can't be calculated at this time, no problem. At least OP should state that the effects are not purely additive. Thanks.

Robert

gc3

Calculator useless as is. Need options for...

Taking a largish dump (before/mid/post-ride)...

Removing decals from wheels...

Passing a scantily clad female on the MUT...

Incremental spending on bike piece parts (multiples of $100)...

njkayaker

It's very unrealistic (and not useful).

If you had said that you were concerned that treating each part separately could overestimate the total effect due to "interaction", that would have made sense.

But what you said was implying that the OP had expertise and resources he almost-certanly does not.

There are so many variables that any such calculator should avoid appearing to be accurate by being precise.

It can only practically be accurate for large effects (and not very precise).

rpenmanparker 

Ain't it the truth? And you haven't even mentioned color scheme of the bike, noise of the rear hub, etc. There is no end to it. I am afraid that if we avail ourselves of every enhancement, we might distort the space-time continuum. Not as much as the scantily clad female does, of course, but still...

bbeasley

It reflects my experience:

Loose weight
Drink Coffee
Draft

Machin

It would be possible to change the program to account for more than one item at a time... essentially each modification changes one or more of the following: Drag coefficient, frontal area, rolling resistance, mass, power output, so I could just take all the changes into account all in one go.

However, as suggested above, I cannot account for things which directly affect eachother.... e.g. sitting upright on the hoods will probably mean that a back-pack has less effect on drag than if you were wearing a back-pack and were on the drops....

The way I would do it is to essentially repeat the "tell us about your ride" section... so you'd select all the options for your actual ride, then select all the options for the ride you want to predict, and it would then give you a single "time improvement figure" for a ride with all of those options. As suggested; it wouldn't be purely additive of the times currently displayed; it would be a little bit less than the sum of all the individual parts. (essentially, this is because two 5% improvements would 0.95x0.95 = 0.9025, not 0.9000).

I like the idea although it does change the philosophy somewhat, I'll have a think over this one. Maybe I could add another page so you can have the individual improvements and then a second page with the combined improvements...?

Machin

I agree; something I posted about in the other thread:-

Machin

Haha! If you can provide a link to a scientific paper/study into the effect I can definitely add it in!

Drew Eckhardt 

Hardly.

Here on the 41 we like to buy stuff and knowing a $1500 wheel set will only increase our speed by 1% introduces additional psychological barriers to doing so.

Less facetiously I'd like to see the assumptions or references behind the web site.

Is a "traditional wheel" a 32 spoked box section wheel ridden by grumpy old men, or a 25mm deep 24 spoke unit which seems to be the new entry level standard? What do the drag vs speed curves look like?

What was the baseline for riders doing high intensity training, where did their maximum heart rate come from, and how did that relate to their lactate threshold?

To extrapolate and summarize a little "If you're going to ride a UCI legal bike, it's the engine not the bike" and if you'll be going up hill "It's the six pack stomach (looks like or comes from), not the bike."

Trained amateur athletes have picked up a 25% power increase switching from training via heart rate to training with power. For a 145 pound cyclist going from 200 to 250W that's a 21% speed increase headed up a 6% grade

https://www.training4cyclists.com/iro...s-in-12-weeks/

or maybe the improvement is riding VO2max intervals instead of doing long steady state rides, or getting coaching versus not.

"How to be fastest given 6-8 hours a week" with hard data could make a bigger difference in cyclists' speed than help selecting equipment.

Psimet2001 

I clicked because I had never heard of "X" giving marginal gains. I have never seen it as a performance enhancing drug.

I have seen such large swings in form by so many riders over the year that I have become permanently skeptical about just about everything.

I personally like the idea of stacking all these marginal gains. I can't wait to see the rider lining up at a start line with every checkbox ticked....because that's how you win races.

Gatorfreak

That's pretty cool. Unfortunately for me, I don't have all that much (speed) to gain by losing weight. Oh well, I'll try to drop the weight anyway since it's free. May I report something of a bug? If you select 25mm tires then the results show the differences if you were to use 20 and 25 (rather than 20 and 23). At least it correctly reports that staying at 25mm will yield no difference.

How about adding shoes (flexible soles vs carbon soles)?

Some of you: Don't take it so seriously. Sheesh. It's educated guesses, not gospel.

Now I'm off to clean my chain so I can take 77.7 seconds off my 50 mile ride time.

Shimagnolo

And lately it's been scantily clad female in yoga pants!

rpenmanparker 

No wonder I am so damn slow. Dirty chain. Who knew?

Machin

I will shortly be adding the details of the study/report from which the results are derived, so that if you want to do more reading you can; some however are not available freely on the internet. I'll put this in the pop-up window that appears when you click "info" next to any of the marginal gain results.

Yes, spot on. The full report is entitled "Aerodynamic characteristics of low drag wheels" and featured in Aeronautical Journal 99, by Greenwell, D.I, N.J. Wood, E.K.L Bridge, and R.J. Addy. 1995. This wheel was used as the standard to which all others were compared.

RChung

I couldn't find on your calculator what your values for Cd, A, and Cr are, nor their new values for the proposed changes.