Originally Posted by
gsteinb
how they feel isn't really empirical. climb a long hill on a 14 pound bike; take time. repeat on 20 pound bike with 3 pounds of water and a 1 pound of tools. Your time will be faster on one. Clearly your data is lacking. This is simply science.
If you are only doing a point-to-point hillclimb, i.e. Mt Washington, I would agree.
But in a real world situation, much of the riding is reasonably flat, in which case the weight matters not at all (except acceleration at the start).
Here is a fun calculator that you can plug numbers into and see how much/little a weight change in the bike makes:
http://bikecalculator.com/veloMetricNum.html