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

After the climbs I just described, I did some serious lifting, first riding south from Grenoble to Bourg d'Oisans which involved significant elevation gain except on gradual grades along the D-series roads. Traffic was busy on these highways, and the riding was scenic for sure but not super-fun. Rain, which was forecast for the afternoon, arrived a bit early, and I was happy for the rain coat and rain pants I had packed for my trip. Riding with my stuffed backpack, a floppy rain jacket, and black rain pants didn't make for the Euro-racer experience, but it was effective. I stayed dry and warm. In Bourg d'Oisans, I had time to pass, and hung out for a bit in the main town. As the afternoon passed the rain picked up and I saw only a few riders. Riding was doable, as it wasn't super-cold (probably around 15C in the town, colder at elevation). But the 60 km I'd done to get there were enough. The next day dawned surprisingly cold, at least by my standards. In t...

Someone pointed this blog post out to me. Climb by Bike Interesting experiment: the rider (Luke, who went on to finish 26th in the Tour of L'Avenir ) did L'Alpe d'Huez four times, each at close to 275 watts average power (measured with Powertap), trying different "treatments". In sequence, in the same day: Normal bike + 1.8L extra water in tires : Yes, you read that correctly: water was put in the tires. The goal was to determine the difference between the effects of rotating mass and translational mass on climbing times. Now the theory is simple enough: rotating mass makes it harder to change speed. In other words, harder to speed up, harder to slow down. Typically during a climb you speed up and slow down a lot: a bit each pedal stroke, in fact. So the magnitude of these speed changes is fractionally less with more mass in the tires relative to on the frame. But one speed increase is not canceled by an offsetting speed increase: the net speed ch...