Look at me talking when there’s science to be done. <\/p>\n
This evening, I tried the Arthurs Seat loop on my mountain bike rather than my usual city bike. The mountain bike is much lighter, but the tyres have more rolling resistance. I was hoping that the weight reduction would see me fly up the hill fast enough to compensate for the drag0reduced top-speed. But I didn’t know whether the tradeoff would be worth it.<\/p>\n
So, after powering up and down the hill, I was pleased to to see that I’d broken the twelve minute barrier for the first time – 11:44 for one lap. No idea what my heartrate was, because I’ve misplaced my monitor, boo. But twelve minutes is significant because it means that a “5 laps in one hour” target isn’t too far off.<\/p>\n
But when I got home and looked at the GPX trail, I got a surprise. My climb been a whole minute *slower* than my previous ride. But the descent was 1m20s faster. Not sure what happened on the way up. The gearing is all different, and maybe without the HRM I wasn’t pushing as hard as I could’ve?<\/p>\n
It’s not a huge surprise that the descent was faster. On the last ride I took the cycle path, whereas this time I had a clear run on the road. I also pushed 30mph the whole way, thanks to the big gears I have on the MTB. On the city bike, my nexus hub runs out of ratios and I have to freewheel part of the way. Either way, it looks like drag wasn’t a big deal. The Panaracer Razer tyres I have on the MTB are pretty quick too.<\/p>\n
It’s not that long ago that this kind of analysis would’ve been the preserve of olympic athletes. I think it’s great that you can do it all yourself now with a low-end phone! You can even play ‘what if’: if you stitch together the climb I did last time with the descent I did tonight, you’d get a lap of 10m44s.<\/p>\n
Now, where did that cake go?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Look at me talking when there’s science to be done. This evening, I tried the Arthurs Seat loop on my mountain bike rather than my usual city bike. The mountain bike is much lighter, but the tyres have more rolling resistance. I was hoping that the weight reduction would see me fly up the hill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/lejog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}