deb

‘Nuff math geekery for today. Climb away, and pedal in cycloids. Don’t forget to wax.

Have a beer, it will all become clear!

Nails: Don’t trim them with scissors. Bite them. I know it’s counter-productive for the weight loss thing, but you have to look at the big picture. Fingernails are good roughage and who doesn’t need a little more fibre in their diet. Plus, if you eat your own body parts, isn’t that recycling.

Sunscreen: It’s not just the weight of the sunscreen. When you get out on the trail the sunscreen acts like glue and the dust sticking to the glue triples the already huge weight of the original sunscreen.

Sweating got mentioned but somehow didn’t rate its own category. I hereby indoctrinate SWEATING into the gallery of weight loss techniques. Or rather NOT sweating. Why? Mostly for the same reasons I gave with sunscreen above. Dirt and dust stick to sweat nearly as well as they stick to sunscreen.

Now of course these last 2 issues are only of concern to mountain bikers because everyone knows that riding on the road or velodrome attracts no dirt. In fact I suggest that after a road century you simply pull on your business suit and go right out and shake the presidents hand. You can brush your hair if you wish, but since you haven’t been “roughing it” off road there should be no grubbyness to feel selfconscious about.

There’s a glaring omission in the clothing area also… How can you throw away half your kit and talk about no need for comfort and keep the heaviest part of the cycling outfit – the chamois. Get rid of the chamois. If you want to go fast this helps in several ways. You’re lighter (the whole point of this post), it absorbs sweat thus holding on to weight (if you’re still sweating at this stage) and finally it allows you to sit down while riding.

On that last point, who’s the fastest bike rider you know? Robbie McEwen? Alessandro Petacchi? Tom Boonen? I don’t want to get into a semantic argument here. The point is these guys are the fastest of the fast and when do they go the fastest? At the end of a race. How do they do it? The don’t sit on the seat. Imagine how much faster they’d be if they never sat down. It will take some work and you’ll bring some new muscle groups into play but it’s worth it in the end.

And what buckythedonkey said too: balls. Lance Armstrong was 50% faster than everyone else because he had 50% less testicular encumberances when he climbed.

Josh: I was going to look that up. Thanks for saving me the time. Now I’ll just spend the rest of the evening reading about the cycloid in nature chapter I’ve found in the textbook I’m appraising for school.

The ratio of sproket to chainring must be 1:n where:

d = diameter of rear wheel
c = crank arm length
b = beer-related miscalculation factor (b=1 being an error-free calc)
n = d/2cb

Er, I think (hic!).

BTW, were you riding down the south side of Suncrest about 9:00 Friday evening? Maybe it was some other guy with the armpits cut out of his jersey and a chamois taped to his bare butt. Whoever it was was descending quite quickly, which someone who is truly light would probably lack the mass to do.