On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

A rider died in this past Satuday's Levi's Grand Fondo when he missed a corner on the Hauser Bridge descent and went off the road. Here's the story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat . Michael Muhney, 40, said the rider was just ahead of him and was “just barreling” down the hill despite numerous course marshals cautioning riders to be careful on the descent. “He was hauling,” he said. The Fondo is a "timed ride" and not "a race" according to the story. Here's how Oxford English Dictionary defines race: race (noun) 1A competition between runners, horses, vehicles, boats, etc., to see which is the fastest in covering a set course. I don't know -- seems to apply here. So the problem is you have a race over a technical, dangerous course and that means people are going to take risks, and when people take risks by definition sometimes things go wrong and people get hurt or die. Fine -- if you want zero risk of death stay in bed in the morni...

It's time once again for the Low-Key Hillclimbs , and this will be the 20th anniversary of the first edition, when Kevin Winterfield and I brashly organized a series of 12 consecutive weekly climbs extending from October through almost Christmas. And the amazing thing is we pulled it off. I'm less brash now but I don't need to be: I have fantastic support in putting the series on and so far we've had minimal interference. It's really been a wonderful thing. I've got some decent fitness this year after having ridden SuperTour, organized by Sid and Linda Fuhrer, then raced the Mt. Tam Hill Climb and the Fremont Peak Hill Climb. For the first time in years I've actually been focusing on training instead of riding, and it's helped, starting with the fantastic dose of base I got from SuperTour. My time at Fremont Peak wasn't what I wanted, although I rode fairly well at Mt. Tam the week before. It was particularly hot at Fremont Peak so that took ...

Previously I blew it by posting that Cannondale had retained the old geometry for the new 2016 Evo. This had shocked me since I knew they'd hired Damon Rinard, formerly of Cervélo, the pioneer in stack-reach design, something the old Cannondale clearly did not follow with weird kinks and jogs in its stack-reach progression due to odd jumps in seat tube angle as sizes increased. I'd gotten the geometry chart by clicking links on the Cannondale website, but somehow I'd clicked a link for the 2015 geometry starting from the 2016 Evo page. So I'd been too hasty. Well, I was finally pointed to the correct geometry chart. Here's a comparison of old Evo and new Evo: 2015 Evo: And, finally, the 2016 Evo: Here's the stack-reach progression: Plotting stack versus reach shows the design has switched to a stack-reach focus, with continuous small increments in seat tube angle rather than descrete jumps, with a design transitioning from closer to the Trek H2 in sm...

[b]Comment:[/b] The following post is in error. The geometry chart on the Cannondale site is still the 2015 bikes. Bikerumor had an article where they described geometry changes for 2016, including adjustments to stack-reach in small and large sizes, and a general drop in bottom brackets consistent with the trend to wider, deeper tires. I'll post a follow-up post when I get the geometry chart for 2016. Cannondale just announced it's 2016 Evo . There's been a flurry of really attractive new bikes announced this year, including the new Madone 9 from Trek, the incredible Venge ViAS from Specialized, and the new Scott F02 update to the Foil. A common feature of all of these is increased focus on aerodynamics and comfort. Aerodynamics isn't new, with bikes going back to the Kestrel Talon and Cervelo Soloist Carbon examples of carbon frames designed for aerodynamic efficiency. However, the bikes have never been as popular as was predicted because in the end riders lik...

SCRainmaker has a "hands-on" (as opposed to an "in-depth" review; still way more in-depth than any other reviews on the web) of the new Garmin Edge 20 and 25. These are, finally , Garmin addressing the simpler/lighter-is-better market for GPS. On bikes, a huge amount of attention and money is directed towards minimizing weight. The best way to minimize weight of a GPS unit is to ride without a GPS unit. But the prominence of social networking website Strava has increased the value of GPS data. So for many, GPS has become a virtual requirement. What's the point of riding if you can't get kudos? Yet despite big push for lighter bikes, and with real estate on the handlebars and stem so limited, Garmin has seemingly ignored the value of lighter-and-simpler-and-smaller by producing a series of increasingly complex, heavy, and bulky GPS units. The Edge 500 came out more than a half-decade ago, and yet it has remained the lightest and most compact unit pro...

The Golden State Warriors lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers in basketball last night. They're now down 2-1 in the series. The first team to win 4 is the champion. I don't care about basketball but there's one thing I like about the game and that's that scores generally increase relatively at random (I hope -- I hope the near miraculous comeback yesterday from a 17-point deficit after three quarters wasn't programmed), and that games are won to some degree seemingly at random. I like random. As an aside, I do find it remarkable in basketball how often a team with a big deficit claws its way back only to lose in the end by a small margin. I'd like to see a statistical analysis of this. A huge amount of money is at stake for games not being a total blow-out. I do wonder at this. Basketball has long seemed to me to be more about the show and less about a fair contest. And that makes it very difficult for me to care about the result. But this is an aside. As...

First I saw it on the UCI list of approved frames for June , then I saw a teaser video posted to the Trek website , and then this uncredited photo was posted to the Weight Weenies forum: My that looks fast. Maybe it's the color, but it reminds me of the Canyon Aerooad. The Canyon has done rather well in the tunnel, not in the class of the Cervélo S5, but fairly good. See for example Tour magazine data here . So I expect the Trek will be at least this good. But then there's weight. The Madone 7 was quite light with the vapor coat -- under 800 grams. But then the Emonda came out, pushing that lower, but there's only so far you can go below that. So the Madone was a bike of compromise. Now they want you to buy two bikes: the lightweight Emonda and the "aero" Madone. So the pressure's off on weight. But I wonder how they did. Nothing on this one looks particularly heavy. From what I see I really like it. The days of bad-riding aero frames are over...

I looked at how grade variability affected average power when climbing a hill. Honestly I thought the result was going to be larger, but the reality was it was a relatively minor effect. When the hill is very gradual, for example 1%, variations in grade of a certain fraction have little effect on speed. When the hill is very steep variations in grade are more significant, but since they increase power only via wind resistance, and wind resistance is relatively unimportant (assuming still air), again variations in grade have little effect. It's only important in the middle ground where speeds are high enough that wind resistance is relatively important but where grade variations have a relatively large influence on speed. A virtually equivalent logic applies to rolling resistance variation. A variation in rolling resistance about an average value (averaged over distance) will have the same effect as a variation in grade by the same absolute amount. So the effect of variabilit...

I've looked at this matter before, but one factor which I've seen continually neglected in all of the climbing power analysis estimates is the effect of grade variability. Road grade on climbs is almost never constant: it varies about a mean in some fashion. Yet the estimates are almost always done assuming constant speed, constant power. Now these estimates end up remarkably accurate anyway. Why? Because the grade variability effect is negligible? Well, no. It's because you're canceling one mistake with another. For example, you neglect grade variability, which always increases power, but you also neglect drafting, which always decreases power. How does grade variability increase power? It's because grade variability typically results in speed variability and speed variability yields variability results in variability in wind resistance and wind resistance, by virtue of being superlinear, is increased more by increases in speed than it is decreased by d...

Watching the Astana supremacy in the final kilometers of today's stage at the Giro gave me an idea... The biopassport is based on the assertion that there is a statistical uncertainty in testing values. But the more data you have, the tighter the bounds which can be set under a given threshold of certainty. If you're examining data from 8 riders in a batch, while any one of them may exhibit variations consistent with normal variation, if they exhibit correlated variations then that becomes less consistent with random chance. So does it make sense to apply testing protocols to teams as a whole in addition to individual riders? If the team fails analysis while each individual on a team passes, do you eliminate the whole team from the race? It seems a promising idea. No two-year bans, of course:, that would be unfair to individual riders, but disqualification from a race, at least. The key is you're introducing an additional source of variation in addition to tempora...

I had my misgivings about the Ohlone 50k on Sunday, for which I'd registered. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I'd tried going down the entry list for other runners who live in San Francisco, checking for them on Strava to see if they lived close, and none did. So I tried to send messages to those I could find on facebook to see if we could coordinate somehow a ride out. But I got only one response, in the negative. He was staying in Pleasanton the night before, relatively close to the "finish" in Del Valle where we were to meet for a shuttle ride to the start of the point-to-point run. Maybe I should try to get a hotel as well, I thought. Then I could ride to the finish on my bike. Or, more fun, I could try camping out in Del Valle. But that involved carrying a tent and sleeping bag and making reservations which probably weren't available still. It all became irrelvant when I checked the event website to see that the run had in fact been ...

I saw this on a favorite cycling forum, where I "redacted" some of the key details. Spoke to a friend and reliable source, employee of a large pro team. His sentiments about the tweet is that basically everyone agrees with it and openly think that has organized doping going on to some extent and/or still has back channels to Schumi. Also, the common belief is aligned with what Voigt and TSP said in that if the UCI didn't give the license they would have their pants sued off by entities with very deep pockets so they had little choice. A final rumor is that some riders are using new peptides similar to those that were recently banned like GW-501516 , a new type of growth hormone and IGF that aren't tested for yet, and various banned anabolics in suspension form during training camps so that the ultra short half-life times won't show up on test results. If the rider were to take the substance right after a ride the glow time would only be around 6-8hrs for a n...

I heard at the Tour of California that the new Cannondale Evo is basically done, and I further read there's a new version of the CAAD10 which will be called the ... drumroll.... CAAD12. So what about the CAAD11? The answer is they're skipping the CAAD11 to make room for that to be used for the lower-level version of the new bike. If it's like the Evo and CAAD10 the two bikes will be very similar except for that the Evo bike is carbon and the CAAD is aluminum. I've ridden very few bikes (I always say I want to test bikes but it's surprisingly hard to make time to do this). The Evo is the 2nd to last bike I've test ridden (the latest was the Parlee ESX, the name supposedly short for "Essex". Yeah. Right). Anyway, Evo was a [i]very[/i] nice bike: the handling was spot-on, it felt good, there seemed to be no penalty for its stiffness, and it went against the fatty tube syndrome which had been in full fashion at the time it came out. Fatty tube is ...

Here's a finish line photo of the final stage of the 2015 Amgen Tour of California: I love photo finish images because the "x-axis" which is usually position in most photographs, is time instead. There's only one spatial dimension. The camera records a slit image of what is crossing the finish line at a given time. So if you measure the "width" of a bike crossing the line, that's how much time it takes for the bike to cross the line. If I assume all bikes are the same length, then speed is inversely proportional to the amount of time taken to cross the finish. Here's a typical bike geometry chart, in this case for Trek's racing bikes, which have "H1" and "H2" geometry. Note the wheelbases vary from 97.4 to 101.8 mm, a range of 4.5%. In contrast the Specialized Tarmac goes from 970 mm to 1013 mm, a very similar range. Cannondale: 962 mm to 1012 mm. In all, wheelbases seem to vary by around 5% among bikes across t...

I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over...

Last time I described that the recursive algorithm I proposed for finding climbs in a profile was: identify all non-overlapping rateable climbs in a profile: If there's no rateable climbs of some minimum climb rating, then we're done. identify the highest-rated climb in a profile. identify all rateable climbs preceding this climb (recursive) identify all rateable climbs following this climb (recursive) I implemented this in Perl, which went a lot faster than it had taken to implement my previous, unsuccessful iterative approach. I tested this on randomly generated "profiles". I put "profiles" in quotes because they're not very realistic. I had to define a "minimal" climb, so this I decided was 5 meters gained in 0.1 km. This is a 5% (approximate) grade for only 100 meters. So to be identified as a "climb" the simulated road would need to be steeper and/or gain more altitude. Initially I used the conventional Fiets formula...

Recently I became interested in Jobst Brandt's climbing-descending algorithm for the Avocet 50. Jobst died recently, and I think it's safe to say the man was absolutely brilliant. Among his many contributions to cycling is the Avocet 50 altimeter climbing-descending algorithm, which has been the "gold standard" for determining total climbing on routes. For many years it was the most reliable determination of what a cyclist would consider "climbing", filtering out small altitude fluctuations which could easily be due to "measurement noise". But to compare Jobst's algorithm to mine I needed hill profiles. So I wrote a little code to make random hill profiles. But it gave unrealistic results: rounded profiles, where the hills were more like sine waves than jagged peaks. This wasn't too surprising because the algorithm I used was simple: generate random-normal distributed altitude points then convolve the resulting profile with a well-be...

The Tour of California men's race is underway and so it's time for me to post my picks. So without any excess discussion, here's my picks: Andrew Talansky, Garmin-Cannondale Phil Gaimon, Optum Joe Dumbrowski, Garmin-Cannondale Darkhorse picks for the top 10 are the Morton brothers on Team Jelly Belly . Talansky is an established stage racer, and his teammate Dumbrowski did a breakthrough race here in 2012 ( story on Dumbrowski here ). Phil Gaimon honed his form with Garmin in the World Tour last year, and is focused on this race. He won the Redlands Classic fairly conclusively and knows what it takes to do well in California. A lot of the pack is here just for training or stage wins. So the battle for GC is fairly limited. So these are my top 3. Really funny with Gaimon: Diamondback had a special cookie-themed bike built for him for the race but they did it in the wrong size. That's perhaps the difference between the pro tour and pro-continental. I'm...

I had to do this problem for some C++ code I'm writing for work and so decided to put the result here. I have a scalar function defined over an irregular 2-dimensional mesh of triangular elements and I need to integrate the function over the surface, for example to find the average value. All I have are the coordinates of the elements. triangular mesh example, from University of Vermont Consider an element with points p 0 , p 1 , and p 2 . I can define side vectors r 0 ≡ p 1 - p 0 , and r 1 = p 2 - p 1 . Then I can determine the area of the triangle a = | r 0 × r 1 |. The integral of the function over the area is the multiplication of the average value of the function times the area. I have the area so I need the average value. This is of course ill-defined because I don't know how the function varies between the three points. But I can guess that it varies linearly. A linear function in two dimensions is defined by three degrees of freedom, for example an i...

Yesterday was the Wine Country Century, or more completely, the Wine Country 35 mile, 100 km, 100 mile, and 200 km rides. I was excited to go because Cara had wanted to do the metric century, and even though I thought with a bit of preparation she could do the 100 miler, I was glad she was ready to do events again, after a series of injuries. The official start time window for the 200 km course ended at 7:30 am, and at 7:20 am I saw Jeffrey at the start. "You're starting late!" he said. "No -- it shouldn't take much more than 8 hours to finish," I responded, my feelings slightly hurt. But I immediately realized I had no basis to make this claim. I'd hardly been riding at all. My "training" for the event consisted primarily of an easy ride with Cara the weekend before. and part of the SF2G First Friday Friendly Frolic on Friday, the day before the ride. That FFFF had been encouraging, though, as I managed to tie my PR up Cortland Road in...