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This is nice reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/05/jody-rosen-two-wheels-good-bicycle-history/661144/

One bit that's isolated and quoted within that:

[On] a particularly free-flowing ride, [your] body and being—shoulders, hands, hips, legs, bones, muscles, skin, brain—seem to be inseparable from the strong but supple bicycle frame. At such moments, to conceive of the bike as a vehicle is perhaps not quite right. It may be more accurate to think of it as a prosthesis. Ideally, it is hard to say exactly where the bicyclist ends and the bicycle begins.
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Ouch. Although I have seen plenty of cyclists with this attitude, crossing red traffic lights without looking (seemingly), riding on the wrong side of the road or just weaving in and out of the road as they see fit without looking.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: jdd
quote:
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Standing was linked to higher blood flow and pressure, prompting the scientists to back the common advice for male cyclists to stand up on the pedals every 10 minutes as potentially 'effective' and easy to do.

But they warn that this is an arbitrary time period, so more evidence is needed on how often men need to stand on their pedals, and for how long.
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end quote

so, I guess the stand-up bike wasn't such a stupid move after all? ;)

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luka said:
Standing was linked to higher blood flow and pressure, prompting the scientists to back the common advice for male cyclists to stand up on the pedals every 10 minutes as potentially 'effective' and easy to do.
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Yeah. I prefer my rollers over a turbo trainer for indoor riding. But on rollers pedaling while standing has so far proved impossible for me for more than a few strokes. And after 20 min or so the numbness is really unpleasant.
 
OreoCookie said:
This might be a taaaad late, I checked periodically, but the Olympic Women's Road Race is finally up. Watched it. Really great, you can really see the pain and effort in Anna Kiesenhofer's face.
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You can find me in the crowd for a solid 3 seconds, perhaps.
All my Olympics tickets got cancelled cause of Covid so I biked out to the course and got to see the peloton for a solid 15 seconds, and all the support vehicles for 15 minutes...

Might rewatch the whole thing this weekend. I still want to cycle the whole Olympics course to see how I compare (not at all) but haven't yet... That would be a fun trip though.
 
Benedikt said:
Might rewatch the whole thing this weekend. I still want to cycle the whole Olympics course to see how I compare (not at all) but haven't yet... That would be a fun trip though.
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To be honest, reading off the stats, it is not too dissimilar from a tour I did last week (130–140 km, 2,900 m of elevation). The profile was a bit different, though. Still, the race is a mixture of amazing, boring and amazing again. Kiesenhofer attacked from the gun and stayed in the front for the whole race. She couldn’t hide weakness by staying in the draft, she really had to be the strongest rider by a wide margin that day. I felt a bit bad for the Polish and Israeli rider, if they had had a little more to give, they would have gotten a silver and bronze. But they went all out, too, and it just wasn’t quite enough. Still, they went gonads to the wall for a medal, and they deserve kudos for that.

I tried watching the race after it had unfolded, but was geoblocked. I noticed that some Olympic events were uploaded bit-by-bit on the official channel, and I kept an eye out.
 
OreoCookie said:
To be honest, reading off the stats, it is not too dissimilar from a tour I did last week (130–140 km, 2,900 m of elevation). The profile was a bit different, though. Still, the race is a mixture of amazing, boring and amazing again. Kiesenhofer attacked from the gun and stayed in the front for the whole race. She couldn’t hide weakness by staying in the draft, she really had to be the strongest rider by a wide margin that day. I felt a bit bad for the Polish and Israeli rider, if they had had a little more to give, they would have gotten a silver and bronze. But they went all out, too, and it just wasn’t quite enough. Still, they went gonads to the wall for a medal, and they deserve kudos for that.

I tried watching the race after it had unfolded, but was geoblocked. I noticed that some Olympic events were uploaded bit-by-bit on the official channel, and I kept an eye out.
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Yeah, but doing it at that speed would be a challenge! At least the hill that I was at, they put some solid effort into climbing that.
Obviously the roads wouldn't be closed for my one man Olympics but I figure I'd take a few hours beyond.

It was a great race and I loved the race Kisenhofer ran. The lack of radios also affected it and made me think TdF and others should also stop those.... Make people actually have to pay attention to the racers around them and whether any strong ones might have slipped through the cracks!
 
luka said:
quote:
......................
Standing was linked to higher blood flow and pressure, prompting the scientists to back the common advice for male cyclists to stand up on the pedals every 10 minutes as potentially 'effective' and easy to do.

But they warn that this is an arbitrary time period, so more evidence is needed on how often men need to stand on their pedals, and for how long.
......................
end quote
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The Selle Italia Superflow, or whatever similar saddle model with an inside opening. is really great to reduce the pressure and numbness. No need to think about this "10 minutes threshold" :)
 
Benedikt said:
Yeah, but doing it at that speed would be a challenge! At least the hill that I was at, they put some solid effort into climbing that.
Obviously the roads wouldn't be closed for my one man Olympics but I figure I'd take a few hours beyond.

It was a great race and I loved the race Kisenhofer ran. The lack of radios also affected it and made me think TdF and others should also stop those.... Make people actually have to pay attention to the racers around them and whether any strong ones might have slipped through the cracks!
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Quite a few people got upset about the lack of team radios. I thought it made for great racing. (When I race, I don’t have team radios either, so I can relate.) It wasn’t as if the competition was in the dark, they were in touch with their teams regularly and at least Shapira and the Polish cyclist knew that Kiesenhofer was ahead. (I was really rooting for them, getting caught in the last bit of the race sucks. But they gave their all.)

The commentary made it seem as if the teams were left in the dark, suggesting that there was some sort of language barrier between the Japanese organizers and the teams, but I haven’t heard any specifics afterwards. On the other hand, aren’t there some events (e. g. nationals) where team radios aren’t allowed either?

IMHO not allowing team radios makes a lot of sense for the Olympics. Team radios are meant to allow teams to coordinate (duh). But this gives a huge advantage to nations that are actually allowed to assemble a team, e. g. the Dutch and the Germans who had 4 racers participating. Smaller nations would likely be squashed. You could also tell that the Dutch team was not well-coordinated, basically each of them could have gotten a medal and nobody really wanted to sacrifice themselves for the team (as would be standard operating procedure in UCI events). The medal doesn’t go to a team, but an individual, so the lack of team radios makes a lot of sense to me.
Elzico2012 said:
Crazy to know she is a scientist, postdoctoral researcher in mathematics, and trained by herself before the games, to beat all the peloton.
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Her PhD supervisor actually gave a talk at a workshop I organized shortly after. Her supervisor is a character, an amazing researcher and all-around classy individual. Because of Covid-related travel restrictions, the workshop was virtual. I wish I could have met her in person. I asked her what she feeds her PhD students … :flip:
 
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