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.

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

Where the 'dork pedals

Notice the Web links at the right of the picture. These are all sites I frequent and that have been blogged about specifically (e.g., Sheldon Brown) or are places from where many of you have followed links to come here (e.g., Cycling Plus forums). Cycledork is only about several months delinquent letting readers know where the good stuff is. Expect to see more links in the future.
One link that I don't believe has been referred to previously is New Belgium Brewing Company. New Belgium, which brews Fat Tire Amber Ale among other things, is in Fort Collins, Colo. I go to Fort Collins every summer to visit my mom. My bike comes with me. Fat Tire, of course, refers to the rubber of the cruiser depicted on the ale's label. Years before I ever hit the road and meant it, since I was a Fat Tire drinker, I knew that New Belgium was into bikes. "Tour de Fat: A Ballyhoo of Bikes and Beer" is one of its biggest promotions.
Anyway, in 2005, on my first ride in anything like mountains, I pulled into the overview at the top of Horsetooth Reservoir, and caught another cyclist, J.T. He was taking the scenic route to Estes Park to pick up his car; I was just out for a spin in south central Larimer County. Anyway, we rode together for about 15 miles. During that time I learned he had started his dream job a few months before as a brewer at New Belgium and for fun he was a semipro (my phrase) mountain-bike racer. Beer brewing bike racer leads me on my first ride along the rollers? Let's just say the realization of that white buffalo vision quest and the wisdom imparted still affect me and for the better: hydrate; get plenty of sleep. And to my knowledge it involved no hallucinogens.

New heights indeed

If Bicycling's climbing special makes cycledork want to take a nap, Procycling's "50 Greatest Climbs" from the January issue makes me want to hide under the bed. Four rides in the United States make it: Brasstown Bald in Georgia (No. 46), Mount Evans in Colorado (No. 42), Flagstaff Road from Boulder, Colo. (No. 33) and Mount Washington in New Hampshire (No. 13). It was surprising that only Mount Evans and Mount Washington made Bicycling's unranked, alphabetical-by-state list. Appropriately for a magazine published in a country with a longer history in international cycling than the United States, 43 of the other 46 climbs are European (the other three are in Colombia, Australia and Malaysia). Most are legendary even among those of us who have trouble distinguishing between a genuine hill and a false flat. While I've had my own successful badass, albeit unlisted, uphill adventures in Colorado, I am naively and probably hilariously curious enough to want to answer this question for myself: how hard can Mont Ventoux really be?

On to new heights

The new issue of Bicycling arrived yesterday and there it was, right on the cover: "100 Best Climbs in America." Key stats for the article include miles, average grade and feet of vertical gain. Nearby, relatively speaking, are two in North Carolina, three in Virginia and two in South Carolina. There are some buttkickers included, friends, the kind that make cycledork want to take a nap instead of hit the road. These rides are the sort of thing that makes me feel craven and flaccid for even suggesting The Electra challenge.

Found

I went through one of my daily rituals a little while ago and was pleased when the result came out differently. I've googled cycledork every day since Nov. 16 when the first post went up. Not only is cycledork there today, it sits at the top of the list. While I concede that it's a short list, I've worked relentlessly to claw my way on to it, much less to the top of it. For the first month or so all I got were pages that had nothing to do with me. My entries at the Cycling Plus magazine forums started showing up at about the same time that I could find cycledork by doing a blog search. Recently, similar postings to Bicycling magazine's online community began appearing. But not until today did cycledork show up, free and proud, through a straight Google search. For today at least, being alive in the ether is almost as good as being on the road.

One man's resolution can be another's challenge

But cycledork is just worried about have three free day-light hours every 30 days or so to complete the 12 missions. I attested earlier this evening that I will complete at least one 100-kilometer, or 62.5-mile, ride per month. This pledge resides nestled deeply in the online forums of Cycling Plus magazine. I don't yet subscribe to the hard copy of this U.K.-based publication but I have a feeling that day is coming soon. The C+ forum is more vigorous and seemingly more populist than the forums of its U.S. counterpart Bicycling, the web version of the American general-interest cycling mag (that I subscribe to already). Anyway, my pledge to pedal shouldn't be a problem. I expect December, because there is so little light, to be the most challenging month to squeeze in those miles in an afternoon. That's not for another 11 months. But as I said at C+, check here to see if hold up my end.