This time — I'm serious — I think I mean it

Many of you know that I've been threatening to participate in the time-trial series at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Well, my skinsuit — the garment at right — arrived today. If nothing else I can say that I can fit into a men's extra small garment. The scientist said I don't even look close to ridiculous. Though very tight — there's reason it's called a skinsuit — it is amazingly comfortable. To supplement a response to ladymacsquish, the conventional wisdom about bibs and singlets fitting better is true. I wore it tonight while I did an hour on the trainer and it felt good even though it was straight out of the package. Getting it over my shoulders, both on and off, was a challenge but not even close to insurmountable. I have a few more investments to make and many more hours on the trainer and road before I spend a Wednesday in Charlotte but I think the day is approaching.

The size of your tube doesn't matter that much. Really.

Once again, a reader has come to the authority and asked Cycledork.

Dear Cycledork,

We've had an exciting weekend of assorted flat tires and tube mishaps, so now is a good time to ask a question about tube sizing. The tires on my Giant OCR3 are 700 X 26C. On getting home from picking up a replacement tube (and CO2 canister) at my friendly neighbourhood bike shop today, I noticed that the box says 700 X 23/25C. Now they definitely heard me when I said "26" and they always know their stuff, so I'm assuming that this tube is the right size. But what's with the confusing numbers?

Curiously,

H. Trouser

Dear Mr. Trouser:

I'm sorry to hear about your flats and tube mishaps. The good news is your latest tube should fit your wheel and tire just fine. According to Giant, the OCR3 comes with 700x25 tires so a 700 x 23/25 tube should be fine, even in a 26 . Tirewise, the "700" refers to the diameter of the wheel in millimeters (it comes out to about 27 inches) and the "23/25" refer to width, also in millimeters (a hair less than an inch). Tubewise, the 2100, not terribly different than the OCR3, came with 25s. I've been using 23s for several years. You can probably go as skinny as 23 or as fat as 28 or so. No big deal. Ride and be well.

Yours in velophility,

Cycledork

Just give me that countryside

This question came in shortly before my extended holiday hiatus. Time to tackle it.

Dear cycledork,

What's the advantage of bib shorts over regular shorts? I'm willing to believe there must be one (other than looking like Eddie Albert in Green Acres), but I'm hard pressed to figure out what it is.

-lady macsquish

Dear lady:

Isn't looking like Eddy Albert enough? I do not own any bibs but I'll probably break down one of these days and buy a pair just to see how the other half lives. The magic — even greater than looking like America's most legendary lawyer turned farmer — is that bibs are widely felt to fit better and more comfortably than standard shorts. One review was particularly effusive about the Performance Elite Y Bib Short. It's hard to beat $40 for bibs, a price that's dirt cheap for any lower-body cycling wear. To give some perspective Bicycling magazine has had an award category for "Best Bibs under $200." The Elites probably merit my respect but it's hard to pull the trigger on something I expect would feel as good to wear as the other Performance shorts I have. My bet is that the closer I could come to that penthouse view bibwise the more likely I would be to ride in comfort.

Yours in velophility,

Cycledork

P.S. Any bib owners out there? Are they the Manhattan or Hooterville of cycling togs? We need to know.

The hills are alive

A complete stranger, Sherri, has sent in this question:

Quit smoking in July after 35 years. Bought an entry level bike in Nov, Felt z100. Riding the trainer most days at 60 minutes with Reoch Zonneveld workouts. I've been riding outdoors temps are in the 50s (can't do much in lower temps).

I've been reading about this cadence versus wattage stuff. My big fear is hitting a hill. I know I just need to do it and stopping
wondering/worrying about it.

Question, is there anything specific I can do in my trainer to help when I hit that first hill?

Dear Sherri:

It's hard to express how thrilled I am by your question — and what a good one. First of all welcome to cycling. I started on a trainer for about nine months before I got my road bike in 2004. I am not familiar with Reoch Zonneveld but I'm sure I would have benefitted from 50 different workouts.

About the hill in your future and how to approach it. First of all, accept that you'll encounter one and that you will slow down as you ascend. There's no shame in that. The good news is that the more hills you encounter and more directly you face them the stronger and faster you will become.

Now how can you and your trainer prepare? The bad news is that there is no realistic trainer substitute for a hill that I am willing to pay for. That category does exist though and includes the Travel Trac Real Axiom V3 Trainer ($799.99, performancebike.com) and the TACX I-Magic Trainer ($649.99, coloradocyclist.com for starters with lots and lots of add ons available). These are systems that run through a PC and both include variable resistance. I sampled the TACX once and it has the capacity to be a real buttkicker.

For cheapskates like me, the first step is a climbing block ($15 and up). The block raises your front wheel and is supposed to simulate climbing. I keep telling myself that's what it does. The second step is to crank up the tension, or resistance, on your trainer (free). Resistance is the functional equivalent of gravity, which is what keeps us in one place longer than we want to be when we're going up hill.

Short answer to your question: Work on keeping your cadence up at higher resistance. If you're already maxing out your resistance it's time to hit the road … up hill. And grade be damned.

Yours in velophility,
Cycledork

Turning and churning and burning

Dear Cycledork,

I've been working pretty hard lately on my daily 7.5-mile commute, so yesterday afternoon I decided to dial it down a notch and just enjoy the ride home. Much to my surprise, my time actually improved. This suggests to me that I've been wasting a lot of effort, and that I need to pedal smarter, not harder. Any tips? Just for context, the ride is quite hilly, with about 400 vertical feet of climbing in each direction.

-lady macsquish

Dear Lady:
Funny you should mention this observation. Not only have I seen this advised and suggested in numerous places, I have been trying it myself lately. And I'm getting the same results you are. In most flattish places on my commute I'm dropping back a gear and staying at about the same speeds or going a little faster. Descending I'm backing off two with no drop in speed. Climbing I'm relaxing by a gear in some places but I'm also a masochist and enjoy pushing it on hills. Little bumps are easier to get over at speed since it's easier to keep spinning. Result: my cadence is up, my speed is up, my heart rate is up. I'm considering the semiultimate experiment for this weekend: riding my favorite so called time trial route. My guess is I will be down one or two gears and be at or better than my best time. Look for the report.

As far as hows and whys, I am not immediately able to lay my hands on the best explanation I recall reading on the benefits of spinning — riding so that the cadence, or revolutions per minute of the pedals, is higher. But since I wanted to provide someone else's made up explanation rather than my own, I found this at trifuel.com, a site for people way too interested in these sorts of things and who don't think they have to address lay people (in other words, you're on your own with most of the jargon):

When you pedal a bicycle, your muscular system produces power to propel the bicycle and your cardiovascular system delivers oxygen, fuels the muscles, and removes waste products such as lactic acid. Selecting your optimal cadence is a matter of keeping these two systems in balance. The optimal balance is different for each person.

Spinning at higher cadences reduces the watts-per-pedal-stroke, a measure of the force required to produce a given wattage. This makes the workload more tolerable for the muscles. Most experts believe that this is because fewer fast-twitch muscle fibers must be recruited to create the high torque levels required at low cadence. Pedaling with a too-low cadence increases reliance on fast twitch fibers, causing premature lactic acid accumulation, which makes your legs burn.

Pedaling with high cadence, however, does waste some energy. Imagine setting your bike up on an indoor trainer and cutting off the chain. If you spun 100 rpm, the workload would be zero watts, yet your heart rate would elevate significantly above resting. Just moving your legs fast does use energy. Research has consistently demonstrated that cycling at 40 to 60 rpm generates the lowest oxygen consumption for a given wattage. Pedaling at too high a cadence overloads the cardiovascular system's ability to deliver oxygen to the muscles. The most obvious symptom of this is ventilatory distress.

High-cadence pedaling works your cardiovascular system more, but reduces the relative intensity of the leg muscles. The key, then, is pedaling with enough cadence to keep your watts-per-pedal-stroke at a level that your muscles can handle, but at a cadence that will not overload your cardiovascular system. The optimal balance is different for every rider.

I will translate one phrase: "ventilatory distress" means you can hardly fuckin' breathe. What I get out of the rest of this passage is that cadence is a tradeoff between pushing your legs and pushing your heart and lungs. And another thing: there is not a direct correlation between higher cadence and higher efficiency.

Other sources, such as Bicycling Magazine's 1,000 All-Time Best Tips, point out that becoming comfortable with higher cadences in lower gears can help riders become more comfortable with higher cadences in higher cadences. So keep trying it, see what happens and keep us posted. I'll do the same.

Yours in velophility,

Cycledork

That has made all the difference

Dear Cycledork:

I see a lot of bicyclists in my area drive on city streets, county roads and highways, which are often busy and have narrow shoulders, when bike trails run alongside the exact same route. Why is that?

Though I am admittedly not an avid bicyclist myself (I log a couple hundred miles a year, tops) I far prefer the safety of recreational trails than being on the road. I understand that trail riding can be limiting for long-distance riders who cover more ground than most bike trails provide, but why not take the trail when it's available? Is it uncool for "serious riders" to be seen on a bike trail?

Sincerely,
Mystified in Minnesota

p.s. I don't mean for this to seem "anti-cyclist" and I do acknowledge bicyclists' right to a share of the road.

Dear Mystified:

No anticyclist vibe inferred and what a great question.

Uncoolness doesn't have much to do with it. Safety does. Speaking for myself, I'll ride in the road instead of on the trail for a couple of reasons, which may boil down to one: I don't want to kill anyone — me included.

At this point I consider myself an experienced rider (+/-10,000 miles all seasons, all hours, all levels of traffic over the past 3 years) who goes faster than most of the traffic on the bike trails around here in North Carolina's Triangle. From my perspective, and I'm guessing the perspective of other experienced riders, riders on the trails are unpredictable. Trail riders, or more fairly, less experienced riders, are more likely to be moving slower than I am and are more likely to stop suddenly or move across the path unexpectedly. If I'm going 20 mph and they're going 12 mph and I fail to anticipate their action the results could be catastrophic.

Here's a sobering thought: drivers are, in most ways, more predictable even if they're assholes. Even though I can't take my eyes off them for a second I have a much, much better idea of what to expect. My guess is the riders you see feel the same way. Another way to put it is that it's a lot easier to ride defensively when it's clear I'm the one who will lose catastrophically.

All of that said, this is one particular school of thought, advocated by groups such as The North Carolina Coalition for Bicycle Driving and inspired by the classic "Bicycle Transportation: A Handbook for Cycling Transportation Engineers" by John Forester. Foresterians eschew segregation of auto and cycling traffic because, as the coalition puts it:

"Bicyclists are drivers of vehicles. Every street is a bicycle facility. Bicyclists have the right to access every destination reachable by public roads, and this right is protected by the traffic laws of every state. North Carolina law specifically defines bicycles as vehicles and assigns bicycle operators all of the rights and duties of drivers of vehicles on roads. Scientific analysis of bicycling practice in the United States shows that bicyclists who behave as drivers of street vehicles and follow the Rules of the Road enjoy travel that is much safer and much more convenient than those who do not."

I'd also like some clarification on your definition of "bike trail." Is it separate from the road? If so, how is it separated? How wide is it? What sort of surface does it have? Do pedestrians use it? Is it one way or two way? The answers to all of these questions would affect my willingness to use it. There is a two-mile stretch of road not far from the my house that has a paved, +/-10-foot wide, two-way bike and pedestrian path along a windy two-lane road. For the reasons stated above, I take the road every time. I'm also grateful to the transportation planners who had the foresight to consider riders such as myself in that stretch of road and mark it with signs with a bike on them that state, "Share the road."

The road does belong to all of us, motorized and otherwise. That said, there are creative ways to share. When I'm in Fort Collins, Colo., for instance, I use the bike lanes that are ubiquitous there. Though strict Foresterians would consider the spinelssness of my concession contemptible, for me it boils down to predictability. Drivers and cyclists there are trained that cyclists will be in the bike lane toward the right of the road on both sides. Drivers know where to look for me and cyclists are not surprised to hear someone call, "on your left."

There are some roads I will not ride on. Ever. At some point I have to acknowledge the hostility the road, its users and designers show toward cyclists and take another route. Even on the roads I will ride on not all drivers, nor all cyclists, are willing to share regardless of schemes for everyone to have a piece. But for me, the best way to show my good faith is make clear to drivers that I only need what I'm using and they can have the rest.

Yours in velophility,

Cycledork

Why is the rent on my vent so exorbitant?

We received this question this morning at cycledork central:

Dear Cycledork,
Why do some helmets cost $30 and others cost $200? What's the difference? Aren't they all made of basically the same stuff as a beer cooler?
lady macsquish

Dear lady:
For the same reason that air-conditioning devices range so significantly in price: mass and efficiency. The helmet on the left has 17 comparatively tiny vents and provides all the comfort, in terms of weight and air circulation, of wearing an anvil. The Bell Women’s Bella Sport, now on sale at performancebike.com, costs $22.99. The helmet on the right, a Giro Atmos, has 26 comparatively humongous vents, all of which are larger than the vents on the Bella Sport. It weighs 275 grams, or about 10.5 ounces. Imagine wearing air-conditioned feathers. Plus it offers the same safety as the Bella Sport. The Atmos, now on sale at performancebike.com, goes for $134.99.

Though this is beyond the scope of you question, all of that said, the Bella Sport is the better tool for someone who isn't going to be riding very hard for very long, say no more than 15 mph for an hour or less. For racers or others who are cranking out miles for hours at a time or who feel the need to take every advantage, the cost for comfort or fewer grams becomes worth considering.

And I'm glad you mentioned beer coolers. Beer is close to my heart and never far from my thoughts. It is my hope that bikes and beer is a topic we return to many times in our dogged pursuit of cycling truth.
Yours in velophility,
Cycledork

Ask Cycledork

I have a sweatshirt that says, "There is no thing he does not know." I also have a sister who says I'm mostly full of shit and wife who, more diplomatically, says she's skeptical of some of my explanations. Anyway, the new link above to the right is where I prove the sweatshirt right. Or fake it. Regardless of the views of some loved ones, my lot in life is to dispense knowledge and banish ignorance. So if you've got a cycling question, I've got an answer. Unless inquirers specifically ask for offline responses, all questions will be answered here at Cycledork for everyone to see. Bring 'em on.