gregf83 

We were talking about positioning on the bike not shifting gears.

Doge

I agree. If you are doing max power on a flat track for an hour you only need one gear.
Riders train for months to maintain a power at that position. That is not so much the BF poster's experience, but it does prove a point.

Another TT example.

Another TT example.

A TT bike restricts movement quite a bit. Based on the course such as a this year's UCI worlds had a whole lot of mixed cadence, position and gear (inc bike) changes.

79pmooney

But if you were road racing, it probably won't take long to realize pedaling faster at higher heart rate brings better results. Not always, but usually. Why? Because steady state riding isn't where races are won and lost, it is all in the accelerations and short term very high power output bursts. The rider who spends 4 hours pedaling 85 rpm may not be able to ramp up the power when his competitor goes who has been doing 100+ RPM all race. The race may well come down to who can muscle a huge gear for the next 8 minutes. If you can do it, you are in, If you cannot, you are out. The rider who has been pedaling 85/105 X 100 = 81% less hard will likely have a lot more muscle and quick fuel left for this high exertion.

Yes, Mr 85 RPM has been saving energy all race. He will finish feeling better and might recover faster, but he won't win. He probably will not make the winning split. In fact, all the little accelerations may have taken a real toll on him.

Now, touring, time trialing and riding on your own or in steady group situations is a different matter. Efficiency counts for a lot more.

Ben

Campag4life

Informative post Ben.

Doge

We often mix physics, with physiology, with going fast, with winning*.
There are similarities, but they are different.

*whatever that means to you

Carbonfiberboy 

Cripple the rider, great idea! Just what a rider needs, eh? Blood sugar dropping out, serious leg pain, no power, just the thing. All of which is preventable in a fit rider, just by eating sensibly, i.e. eating like everyone else advises, 150-250 carb calories per hour, every hour from the start. There are only about a zillion lab studies demonstrating that this works, plus the personal experience of 10s of thousands of cyclists. I remember clearly when I was a newbie roadie, starting all over again at 50. I had to eat a bit of carb every 30 minutes or I just fell apart. The ability to ride on fatty acids is one of the slower adaptations developed by training. Today I can ride for hours without eating (or drinking) anything.

OTOH, if a ride is a low-carber, has been a low-carber for many months and has already ridden similar events with a low carb strategy, that's another story. They already know what they can and cannot do. Which is not true of a random newbie rider.

Luckily it is the pretty much universal wisdom not to ride one's first century until one has ridden 75-80 miles using the same fueling and hydration strategy to be used on the century. Of course the sore legs on the rider in your example did not come from lactate. Lactate completely dissipates in under an hour. Those sore legs came from being seriously undertrained. Muscles get worn out if they're not used to long periods of activity.

And of couirse effort is what builds lactate (not lactic acid) in the legs. Doesn't matter what you eat or how fast you spin. It's just high effort. OTOH, the best training for LD cycling is long LT hill repeats and over/under intervals, both of which help to clear lactate and are also the best training for the muscles.

Campag4life

This ^^^ Spot on. Almost hard to believe Doge actually believes what he wrote. Early food intake is critical for last two hours of century performance. "Detuning" a rider by lack of proper fueling early in a long endurance effort is laughable.

Doge

Is that your term for me saying no stimulants / drugs and high fat and protein diet to start?

Blood sugar won't drop. That is a reason to do it. Start with an Avocado and eggs for breakfast. Then some Justin's nut butter every hour or so. Finish with the carbs.

Start with carbs and you have to back off / control yourself and keep the carbs coming, or you bonk. On fat protein for the 16 or so hours before it is very hard to bonk. It is also hard to fatigue your muscles with too much lactic acid. A lot of that has to do with the rider just won't go as hard to start.

I never said they were fit. I specifically said they were first timers at the event.


Everyone else? Froome sent everyone crazy Twittering eggs, Avos (as I've suggested) and salmon for breakfast.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/chris-fro...on-tour-france

Carbonfiberboy 

Weighing in on the position change discussion, IMO for the most part, Greg is correct. I train to ride in a specific position on the saddle and I seldom move around. On very long rides, some muscles might get overused, in which case I just use other ones, but seated in the same position. That's elementary. My upper body position will shift and on a long, fast flat, I'll ride the rivet, not to engage other muscles, but to open the hip angle and get better breathing. I can put up with overusing my quads in exchange for speed.

I do stand to stretch my back and legs and for brief power bursts but as I tire, I stand less and less since my legs will no longer support my body weight. That's usually somewhere over 200 miles - if I'm fit. Otherwise it's otherwise.

Interestingly, I do change cadence during long rides. I find as I tire, my legs sometimes like a faster cadence to take a muscular break before I load them up again.

redlude97

How do you approach a 30 min hill climb during a race or a fondo? Ride a single position and cadence for the entire time? I still find a 10-30 second standing effort every 5 mins at the same power but lower cadence helps to refresh the legs and lungs and allows me to keep right at or above threshold.

redlude97

this is the part that most don't agree with. I still don't believe that is the case because of the carbs.

Doge

For the basic BF profile rider doing a regular ride, I am of the opinion that mixing it up in position and cadence works as well (highest average speed) as trying to hold what they know to be their most efficient position and cadence.

That happens to be natural in road rides. TTs are short and a whole different thing. But as highlighted, even the top in the world did the 2017 TT they mixed it up because the road mixed it up for them.

I concede an hour on the track is best done in optimum everything - after a lot of training.

Doge

Breaking it down. Lets assume the rider is not drugged. I'm really trying not to make this a racing thread. FWIW - my kid races on carbs. I'm not posting about folks that are in the 80th percentile of speed, fitness, distance. My comment and this post id for the "normal" male (cause it is different for women) cycling joe... and I said century/long ride - person that comes onto the Internet and asks how to eat.

"Start with carbs and you have to back off / control yourself and keep the carbs coming, or you bonk. "

For about everything you can find on the Internet you can find the counter.
"Reason 1: Carbs can help boost your mood."
6 Reasons You Should Be Eating Carbs - EatingWell

I believe that to be true. But to last - Just chill dude. We don't want you depressed, we want you controlled. Let the flyboys fly by. Your goal is to finish. Not go 10% faster than you expected for 60% of the race. Finish.

Carbs (and I get Sugar, GI index - I'm trying also not to make this a nutritional discussion) basically get the blood sugar up. Once up, you perform. There are now two issues to deal with.
#1 You likely have no training or ability to deal with the exhaust you body produces.
#2 You need to keep that blood sugar up. Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to not over hydrate, or under hydrate or fill your gut with things that draw resources from your body to digest? No - you have no clue, because you are doing your first century and asking advice on the Internet.

So real simple advice I mentioned in passing in a post and am spending time defending it - I give those who ask me...Eat fat and protein, stay off stimulants and then work into them at the end.

Day before: Normal. No pasta dinner.
Morning: Eggs and Avos
Mile 0-25: Nutbutter and very little electrolyte very low sugar gets absorbed, higher sugar become food (another discussion)
Mile 25-50: Same. Maybe a complex carb.
Mile 50-75: Complex carbs - not so much.
Mile 75-100: Sugar and drugs. Caffeine specifically.

I understand that Caffiene gets the lipids out there ... That is not the point. They need to finish.

Carbonfiberboy 

You don't know that I've tried that, but I have. Now you know. That was, as Lance once said, the worst day on the bike in my life. I bonked on the first pass climb with excruciating pain in my legs. I then stuffed myself with all the carbs my stomach could take and somehow managed to get back up the pass from the other side. Never again.

Yes, one keeps the carbs coming, never stopping. I think that's what I've already written. Of course on a long hard ride, if you don't keep them coming, you'll bonk. That Lance quote was when he couldn't get a gel from the car during the last 20k, which was a pass climb. He bonked.

There's no reason for a first time event rider to be unfit. But if they are, then they are, and they are screwed. No dietary regimen can fix that. There's no "day of" remedy. I can usually get them back on the road and finishing after the cramps die down, but they're not having fun anymore.

The Froome links are a red herring, or maybe red salmon. Yes, one can lose weight by low-carbing it during the weight-loss period in training, but during events Froome ate carbs, before, during, and after just like everyone else. There's never been a competitive low-carb pro rider. There may also be some possible benefit from low-carbing during some training in order to increase the proportion of fatty acids in one's burn. But whether that works better than other methods has not been proven. Lance did the same thing by going on 6-hour rides in the Texas winter with nothing but water. Which is what most of us do - fasted training definitely increases fat burn, however it's also possible to increase fat burn simply by training hard on minimal food.

I'm way out of shape right now, but on Sunday's 2.5 hour tandem ride, I only consumed ~100 calories, carbs of course. My blood sugar was low when we started and just that little bit had me riding strong the rest of the way, in fact far from bonking, I got stronger the further we rode. But then I've become fairly fat adapted on my high-carb diet.

Doge

I made a point in the post for the normal joe. I also said my kid races on carbs.

So you bring up Lance.

I have to do my billing now. I'd love to continue - maybe later.

Doge

You don't count, I don't count, Froome only counts because he is not everybody and certainly Lance does not count.

Lance was wound up like a top on sedatives - that accompanied other stuff.

Carbonfiberboy 

As much as possible, I ride the same position and cadence. My routine is to stand every 10 minutes by the clock for as long as I can comfortably stay up, usually about 45 seconds which is enough to get the blood back into my butt. I usually go over threshold during the stand, but come back down to it soon after sitting. I doubt it does anything good to my legs, but really helps back and butt.

My Garmin is set to alarm every 15 minutes, which is my eating timing. That gives me something that's always coming up pretty soon to look forward to. Most of our local hill climbs are either 15 minutes or over an hour, just how it is.

RChung

Riders don't do extended climbs at a fixed cadence.

Here's how Gustav Larsson climbed Mt. Hamilton during Stage 3 of the 2009 Tour of California.




Here's how Chris Anker Sorensen climbed in the Pyrenees during the Stage 14 of the 2012 Tour de France.

Campag4life

That I agree with.

Campag4life

Doge, you are an outlier on fat and protein fueling to start a century...your so called detune theory. You have to admit. Seems to defy what is known about basic fueling of the body for any cardio endeavor. Depriving the body of what it needs for performance well into an extended cardio effort at the outset just seems counterintuitive.

I have provided a link showing the relationship supporting the ingestion of carbs relative to duration. Can you produce a link supporting 'your theory'?

Campag4life

Trend clearly shows that cadence is slope specific. Higher the slope, slower the cadence. Also, what isn't shown by this data set is whether the rider is standing or sitting...and any correlation between standing versus seated relative to slope which will affect cadence as well...or generally does.

RChung

That's why I shake my head when riders say they found their "ideal" cadence by monitoring their heart rate and power while pedaling on a trainer. In the real world on real roads the range of resistance forces and the demands of a race (or ride) are much wider than the narrow range experienced in a basement on the trainer.

Campag4life

Agree. Makes sense. And cadence even given similar riding environment will differ dependent on rider. Ulrich was never going to turn the RPM that Lance did. Their bodies were different.

redlude97

Thanks for the graphs, it means a lot more coming from someone with your experience. My personal experience mirrors theirs albeit at a much lower power output

DaveLeeNC

This may not be a cadence selection thing at all (the highest slopes correlating with the lowest cadence). It is quite likely that these guys just don'e have a gear that will allow them to climb a 15-20% grade at 100 rpm.

dave