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

It's been a long time since I've done a post here, mainly because I've been working from home a lot, and the loss of my mind-numbing Caltrain commute means loss of blogging time. But I'm compelled to break the silence, at least briefly, to propose a change to the UCI cycling rules... Here's a video of the final km of stage 4 of the Tour Down Under this year . It was a twisty-curvy run to the finish, riders strung out in a single line, the sprinters and "puncheurs" at the front, the climbers drifting further back. Results are on CyclingNews . You can't directly see it from the video but Richie Port (BMC) let a gap open in front of him, that gap according to the finish line timing exceeding the 1 second threshold of the UCI rules (general regulations) : 1.2.107 When several riders finish in a group, all riders in the same groupe shall be credited with the same time. If there is a difference of one second or more between the back of the back wheel o...

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 ...

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 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...

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 strick out with Fléche-Wallone so I'm going to try again here with Liége-Bastogne-Liége. There's a lot of favorites so the best approach is to eliminate some then deal with the rest. The new course doesn't favor Simon Gerrans and combine that with his inferior fitness so far this year due to his early season crash and despite winning last year he doesn't deserve to get on any top-5 lists. Vincenzo Nibali is strong so far this year but he was no weaker last year since he won both the Italian national championship and the Tour de France. But in 2014 he finished 31st here and there's no reason to expect him to suddenly place top 5. He's going to try some sort of crazy attack but the race is so controlled recently that's only a long shot. So no to him. Phillippe Gilbert was certainly strong at Amstel Gold but then he crashed hard enough to destroy his bike at Fléche Wallone. The older you get the harder it is to recover from crashes so while he says he...

Fleche-Wallone used to be my favorite classic, despite the lack of distance. The finish made my legs hurt just watching: the cruelty of the finish being SO close yet almost unreachable. A war of attrition ending in a head-to-head test of suffering. “Back in the day” it was essentially always a small group, for example 2, arriving at the base of the Huy the last time. And with the shift to pack finishes, you can see a jump, starting in 2004 when Rebellin won, in climbing speeds here. It used to be 3:10 was typical, now sub-2:50 is common and it’s never as slow as 3:00. You don’t see the agonizingly low cadence as riders fatigued from riding in a break push their oversized gears up the impossible slope, pushing threw the wall of pain to reach the top before the other guy, then collapsing just past the finish. Good stuff. But now it’s become a virtual pack sprint. Basically the riders with sufficient near the position spin their little gears up the hill and someone wins. It’s still an e...

Liege-Bastogne-Liege is the oldest of the professional bike racing "classics", the first of the hilly classics on well-paved roads which bring out a fresh set of specialists after Paris-Roubaix wraps up the cobbled classic season. CyclingNews reports that the 2015 race will be 10 km shorter than last year's edition. This made me wonder what the historical trend has been for this course. Has it experience a decline similar to what we've seen in Tour de France stage lengths, or an overall increase similar to that of Milan-San Remo? The answer is the latter. Distances overall are at a relative historical high. Even the shorter 253 distance for 2015 is solid by race historical standards: But longer race distances don't mean slower speeds. Here's the trend in average kph of the winner. There was a big increase in the early 1930's with the introduction of derailleurs into pro racing, then in the 1990's with another sort of technological improvem...

After predicting we'd see the only SRAM-using team in the World Tour, AG2R, on SRAM 1×11, I started to have my doubts as the days ticked by approaching tomorrow's Paris-Roubaix and I saw nothing. Well, I finally saw this photo from VeloNews of AG2R's star rider, Johann Vansummeren . Nobody seems to remember this guy won the race in 2011. Anyway, while I don't see his chainring, I clearly see shifting paddles on both brake levers. So it seems AG2R is going for a "little" ring, typically a 44, which they won't really use. My picks for tomorrow remain: Bradley Wiggins: He's taken a very analytic approach to preparation, including extended time riding at the front in the races leading up to Paris Roubaix to build form. His approach has been extremely successful in the past, as he's accomplished pretty much everything so far he's sought to accomplish. He needs to arrive in the velodrome solo and that requires some team support but he has Ga...

The final of the Three Days of De Penne will likely be best remembered as the last time trial Bradley Wiggins ever rides for Team Sky. And indeed he won the time trial with a strong 10-second margin: going out in style. Next on his to-do list is to win Paris-Roubaix. And I think he's going to succeed. Bradley Wiggins is almost annually underestimated and he's shown a remarkable learning trajectory at Paris-Roubaix. He obviously need to drop John Degenkolb to do it but he's an exceptionally smart rider and I like his chances. However, this blog is about the morning road race, a short prelude to the concluding time trial. I don't want to give away the result but I'm forced to do so. Kristoff just held off a late sprint by Greipel, the latter ideally positioned on Kristoff's wheel coming out of the final corner but delayed in starting his sprint by Guardini, who pinned him in. As soon as Greipel had a shred of a gap, Greipel went past. But it was 5 cm ...

The most excellent Inner Ring blog recently posted statistics on World Tour and Pro Continental professional cycling wins so far in 2015: the link is here . These numbers have come into focus due to Tinkoff-Saxo's owner, Alexei Tinkoff, sacking long-time team manager Bjarne Riis. Bjarne has been managing the team, and its predecessors, since it was founded as Team CSC in 2000. Cycling is novel relative to most team sports in that there's no definitive overall standing. The UCI repeatedly cooks up various rankings but these are always consigned to the depths of trivia: it's a sport which is very much in the moment, who wins the race today, with certain races mattering more than others. So on what's important and what's not as important is more a matter of consensus than anything else. No two people will fully agree, except perhaps those who think the Tour is the only game in town. And those "fans" are generally derided by the "purists". I...

I posted my predictions for Milan San Remo yesterday . I was really looking forward to this race, perhaps more than any other of the Monuments. This morning I watched Milan San Remo in two parts. First I watched a feed from steephill.tv until 34 km to go. At that point the riders had finished with Capo Berta and the Cipressa was looming. I left then do to a ride and when I returned watched first one video of the Cipressa and then another of the final 10 km including Poggio. There were small gaps between what I saw live and the first of these videos, and another gap (the Cipressa descent) between the two videos. But despite the gaps I really enjoyed watching the race. I have to say I was pleased with how my picks did. I was all over Cavendish because I thought his team support (especially Kwiatkowski, and Stybar) was so strong and he's a proven rider who has come into the early season relatively fit. Well, stuff doesn't always go as planned, and first Cavendish threw h...

Milan-San Remo is the longest of the classics, in many way a throw-back to the old days where lack of television coverage meant speed and intensity was hard to convey, and lacking that, race organizers had to impress the fans with sheer magnitude: of rugged riders riding superhuman distances over impossible terrain. The thing is until the 1960's Milan-San Remo wasn't particular long by professional standards. It's held fairly close over its history to its present distance of 293 km (1 km shorter than 2014). Here's the course distance from two sources: http://www.milansanremo.co.uk/ through 2009, and http://cyclingnews.com since 2010: The iconic Poggio was added in 1960 to reduce the finishing pack, an inland deviation which increased the distance from 281 km to 288 km. Then in 1982 the Cipressa increased the distance to 294 km to make the end game even harder. Le Manie was added to further increase the attrition in 2008. This last climb was removed in 2014 and ...

Follow-up to San Bruno Hillclimb report: I plot here my relative time to distance for 2015 versus 2014. To generate this plot I exploited the fact I'd hit the lap while waiting on the start line each time. When I check the profiles starting from the lap starts they are essentially the same within approximately 20 meters of distance. However, if I were to have started the times at the start of the lap, the times would have been dominated by the delay until the race start in each case. So instead I interpolated the starts from 20 minutes after the actual lap start. To match times at distance, I interpolated times onto 20 meter intervals for each year's data. Since the course is close to 6 km (5.96 km here), this yields close to 300 points for the full course. So then at each distance I can calculate the difference in times: the 2015 advantage, which I plot, is the 2014 time minus the 2015 time. Here's the result: An aside: this is the first plot I've posted her...

After the 2014 Low-Key Hillclimbs came to a successful conclusion thoughts naturally turn to the San Bruno Hillclimb which comes five weeks later. I'd ridden fairly well at the Low-Key series. After running my first ever 50 km trail race at the Woodside Ramble in April, it had been a decidedly down summer for me fitness-wise, neither doing any running races, bike races, or any endurance rides of note, with the single exception of the Memorial Day Ride (4 days from San Jose to Santa Barbara). I was really in a rut, sort of treading water without making any progress. But spending all of September and the first 12 days of October based in Basel, Switzerland gave a nice boost to my training load. The first two weeks weren't much, and indeed the entire second week was spent working without much training, but weeks three through six were a solid mix of long bike rides and decent runs. This gave me a bit of a cram course in base which had me feeling better on the bike than I had...

The plan: after running my 50 km race in April, the plan was that I'd do some climb workouts to find my cycling legs again, ride the Memorial Day Ride (MDR), a 4-day supported tour from San Jose to Santa Barbara, to provide the base, then top it off with some hard climbing to get my top end. Running to cycling transitions are easier than cycling to running, in my experience. And running prepares you for the sustained effort of climbing in many ways better than riding does. I'd been able to run essentially continuously for 5+ hours at the Woodside Ramble 50 km. All I needed to do was to push out my top end and I'd be in for a strong Diablo. The truth: I had some solid climb workouts, albeit slow, before MDR. MDR left me tired, compounded by other life pressures like work, looking for a new place to live, and finally dealing with the process of organizing my life to move. My weekends were essentially dead, and my Caltrain commute is crippling to my weekdays, leaving S...

Sunday is the first of three organized hillclimbs on Mount Diablo in the coming two months. The second of these races is the Tour of California stage 3 , which ends with a climb up to the Summit via South Gate Road. But two days before there's a public event, The Diablo Time Trial (not actually a time trial) climbing North Gate Road to the junction before finishing the climb on the ATOC course up Summit Road. The third race is the NorCal-Nevada climbing champship race pn 21 June . I pre-rode it last Sunday and generated a profile from my Garmin Edge 500 data. Net distance = 17.55 km, gross climbing = 1070 meters, gross descending = 10 meters, average grade = 6.05%. But obviously there's a lot more to the climb than that. The rating is 2.42 Old-La-Honda equivalents, less than the altitude ratio of 2.72 due to the lesser average grade (Old La Honda is 7.2%). Here's the profile, in imperial units since it was prepared for Low-Key Hillclimbs (replacing the profile I...

I was going to do a post on UCI rule 1.2.064 bls, but Inrng already covered most of what I was going to write following Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Here's the rule in case you don't want to click on that link: 1.2.064 bis It is strictly prohibited to use sidewalks/pavements, paths or cycle paths alongside the roadway that do not form part of the course. Non-respect of this requirement is sanctioned in accordance with Article 12.1.040.14 bis, without prejudice to any other sanctions that may apply. The winning break at E3 Harelbeke yesterday. Photo by CyclingNews : Cycling's a weird sport. Actually, when you think about it a bit, this rule is just weird on its own. You can't ride on sidewalks, pavements, paths, or cycle paths along side the roadway that do not form part of the course . This, apparently, is in contrast with roadways which are not part of the course, which are fine. I thought it was already well established that in a race, any race, you must com...

The UCI reforms appear to be moving forward, with a goal of professionalizing professional cycling. The reforms have been summarized in various stories ( like this one ) but the primary source is the UCI's Info Reform newsletter . It's good stuff, and while San Francisco has gotten some recent insight into realpolitik , so far I've been really happy with Cookson's new term at the head of the UCI. Things honestly appear to be moving in the correct direction. A big issue is the professionalism of professional cycling. Professional bike racing has tended to be ruled by chaos as much as any formal organization. Historically the race promoters have called the principal shots. They want to invite who they want to invite to their races. That typically meant balancing considerations for attracting the best teams, local teams, teams with charismatic riders, and notably in the case of the Tour of California, teams who bring big money race sponsors. It's all been a m...