SF Beta

Better:
SF 2009.1.21

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Trek Emonda: geometry comparison and other comments

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I'd left the Trek Emonda out of my previous comparisons for two reasons. One is it's technically a 2015 bike. Note, however, I'd included the Specialized Tarmac 2015, but that was an iteration on an existing bike. But more importantly I left it out because I don't like it. You'd think I would, as it's marketed as a weight weenie special. But, unlike another weight weenie special, the Cervelo R-Ca, the Emonda is designed with down tubes which show an utter contempt for wind resistance. And for what weight savings? 30 grams. Yes -- 30 freakin' frams: the claimed weight for the Madone Vapor Coat H1 is 720, the claimed weight for the vapor coat Emonda H1 is 690 grams. There's a lot of ways to save 30 grams. 30 grams will save around 0.35 seconds up Old La Honda.... which I'm pretty sure will be squandered to wind resistance by the Emonda's bulbous down tubes. If the CdA of a rider on a Madone is 0.35, and if the Emonda is 100 grams equiva...
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Strava recently debuted its "Suffer Score", which attempts to quantify in one way how hard an activity was. Suffer score, they claim, is based on heartrate: ride further or harder and suffer score is higher. Suffer score is a good move for Strava. Strava's market segment is informal competition. Other web sites have logged how far people ride, and where, but Strava really locked into the demand for competition: competition via social networking. To date these rankings have been based primarily on speed over "segments": routes defined by users, for example on roads or trails, typically up climbs. They then added contests for volume: most miles ridden in a week and most feet climbed, for example. But with Suffer Score, they combine the two: a metric combining both quantity and quantity. Why's this important? Of course not everyone can climb fast enough to compete for KOMs on popular climbs. But a heartrate-based metric levels the playing field to ...
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Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

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