I was quite fired up to go to the lecture at ECU as posted by Lorraine earlier in the blog. The title was a tantalising “MYTHS, SCIENCE AND PERFORMANCE IN CYCLING” and the promise of an international speaker in little old Perth was always a good endorsement.

My wife actually conceded to spend some “bike time” with me and come along as she has a passing interest in training and exercise physiology (we get entertained by that geeky stuff at home).

After rushing through the all day operating list to make the 7pm start (no patients were disadvantaged by trying to get out on time – only trainees) and gulping down a quick dinner we made our way to Joondalup ECU. My wife was co-piloting, and I have learned long ago that she always is right.

We progressed slowly up Thomas Street to be confronted with something not usually a hinderance on the bike – rush hour traffic. More tedious than doing a trackstand at the lights, I was secretly jealous as I saw rider after rider pass. It also gave me a chance to reflect on (appaling) Perth drivers’ behaviour. I think one problem is the attitude that every last spot needs to be fought over and cars left and right were revving up to beat the Yaris to the next lights. People simply cannot stand to “lose” position in the stream of cars, and the senseless swerving and lurching makes traffic less predictable and consequently less fluid.

That behaviour is carried over with merging, as it is not the done thing to let someone into the lane lest they actually drive in front of you. Some drivers couldn’t believe it when I wouldn’t contest the spot in front of myself and gave way. They seemed quite smug to be 3m ahead of me in a queue moving at 3kph. One day I’ll go for the spot, but preferably in an old beat up uninsured Valiant. Newer cars like Prados and polished HSV utes seem to shy away when a carefree old banger with no paint to lose muscles in.

Anyway we arrived at Joondalup ECU with most of our cool intact in plenty of time to find that the talk was titled “MYTHS, SCIENCE AND PERFORMANCE IN CYCLING“. Unfortunately we found out it was subtitled something like “the influence of crank lenght and pedal velocity”…….. Oh dear – we had left out eggheads at home and were not keen on a tedious dissertation (that is what we go to work for).

Anyhow as 7pm rolled up, the room filled with young cyclist types, older masters been cycling before you were born types, not sure if you are an exercise phsiologist or a cyclist or both types, two women who were somewhat patronised by the predominantly male crowd who looked like they were actually very fit riders themselves and demonstrated their seriousness by actually brining paper to take notes types, myself, fuming wife, Jerard, simmering Lorraine (spearate incident the night before).

James martin himself was actually quite good speaker, but had unfortunately lost some of the crowd in his esoteric talk. I will summarise:

Crank length does not seem to matter with MAX POWER (study of 16 with 3 crank lengths from 140-220mm at differnt cadences)

Crank length does not seem to affect fatigue due to the lever effect (as we have gears on our bikes). Fatigue occurs proportional to a pedalling harder, and more times (duh!!)

Pedal speed seems to be the buzzword with regard to making more power.

Pedal speed is proportional to metabolic cost (duh!)

No magic formulas or secret tricks – to go harder and faster you need to get stronger and fitter and more aero/reduce load.

All that stuff about making circles round the pedal stroke is likely to be fallacy – we have ample proof in Johnny and in the past Alistair who kick butt riding in tennis shoes and not doing an upstroke.

I actually suspected as much, although physiology reseach is seriously underpowered statistically when comparing to larger trials in medicine. There were other “highlights” of the night in some questions that came up, but even now I can feel the heat radiate from my wife as they came up. I must say however that it was quite worthwhile to see a scientific discussion although I probably owe my wife bigtime for indulging in my hobby.

Maybe she would like a new bike? Something in 48cm frame?

Le Kuan