Often it is better to lean forward. Leaning forward places your body weight on your entire foot and the pressure on your foot causes it to make better contact with the ground. This means that you are less likely to slip than if you lean backward which puts your weight on your heel, or the rear edge of your shoe, and is more subject to slippage.

This is a great advantage of trekking poles. The poles allow you to be much more forward, making better contact with the ground. In addition, the poles really do support a weight distribution that is in front of your foot. If your feet slip downhill, they slip toward your center.

If you have a hard time hitting your desired race pace during a given workout, try shortening your intervals until you can. For example, if your goal race pace is 1:20 per 100 meters, but you can’t hold that pace over 100 meters, try breaking up your speed work into shorter intervals with rest in between. In this case, I would suggest the athlete try 100′s at a 1:20 with 15-20 seconds of rest in between each interval. As the athlete grows stronger, he or she can add 25 or 50 meters to the length of each interval.

If my goal for an Olympic distance triathlon were to swim 1500 meters in 20 minutes (1:20 per 100 meters) and I currently could not swim a single 100 meter interval in 1:20 of swimming, I would be readjusting my goal. Maybe I don’t understand my own athletic potential.

On the other hand, even if I decided that 15 continuous repetitions for of 100 meters on 1:20 were a reasonable goal, I don’t understand how swimming 100s on 1:20 with 15-20 seconds rest is possible if I am not able to swim a single 100 on 1:20.

Breathe. A full deep breath cause my abdomen to protrude and puts a spring in my step.

Ha. How many times are we going to have to read from that script. Every Tour de France Lance’s team, or Lance himself, appear to be in trouble, appear to be struggling around the stage 8 to 12.

Lance struggling to keep up with Ulrich in 2001 is the prototype of this. You remember that ended the “the look” which was effectively the end of Jan’s tour hopes for that year.

This year Armstrong is saying, “We have to reevaluate.” Paolo Savoldelli says, “We were tired when we got to the base of the final climb.”

Maybe, maybe not. I’m not convinced. The Discovery team has proven before that they are better actors than they are bike riders. You would think that the cycling press would remember.

The amazing news for the day was that 4 of the top 6, and 6 of the top 14, riders were American: David Zabriskie (1), Lance Armstrong (2), George Hincapie (4), Floyd Landis (6), Bobby Julich (11), and Levi Leipheimer (14).

What do these 6 riders have in common besides being American?

They all have experience as part of the Tailwind Sports organization. Tailwind Sports is the management team behind the current Discovery Channel Cycling Team, and the previous US Postal Cycling Team. Tailwind Sports actually owns the team, the names that you read are the names of the sponsors.

I would be interested to know all of the details of the ins and outs of the relationship between Lance Armstrong and Tailwind sports. It seems to me that they have so many aspects of their personalities in common. In any case, Lance is certainly the central athlete of the organization. All of the highly placed American riders in today’s first stage of the Tour de France have ridden on teams owned by Tailwind Sports and captained by Lance Armstrong.

I would guess that all of these American riders were influenced by the successes of Greg Lemond in the Tour in late eighties and 1990. Greg moved cycling into the vision of America and all of these riders were teenagers when when Greg was winning his victories.

What Tailwind Sports has done is to gather up the energy that was generated by Greg’s wins and channel it into an extremely successful philosophy of how to build a cycling team for the grand tours. This is an accomplishment to be proud of.

The thing that I respect most about him is his incredible mental power and focus. Just looking at him, you can see the concentration and intensity of his mind. His preparation and attention to detail is obvious in every thing that he does and every thing that he says.

As a role model, the mental abilities are more accessible than his physical abilities. I don’t expect to ever have a VO₂ Max anywhere near Lance’s, but I do believe that I can approach his mental intensity through practice and training.

Even champions make mistakes.

The six-time Tour winner said he was stung by a bee, but continued to ride after the stinger was removed from above his left eye. The Texan admitted the sting “hurt like hell” and caused him to lose concentration.

A few minutes later, his wheel hit a raised spot in the road as he was turning, forcing his wheel to lock, flipping him over his handlebars. The crash split his helmet in two.

That so sounds like something I would do. Maybe I’m closer than I thought?

This is a highlight of my year. I think that the major cycling tours are the most interesting sporting events on the planet. Part of it is length. Three weeks is a long time. Strategy and tactics are cumulative. You can’t go all out on day 10 unless you have a good plan for coming back on day 11. In a three week race, there are so many opportunities to random chance to intervene.

The other great thing about these grand tours is that there are multiple ways to succeed. The winner on general classification, the winner of the stages, the points winner, the king of the mountains. The multiple categories acknowledges the diversity of the skills required in cycling and it reinforces the epic nature of cycling. In cycling, as in life, there is more than one way to succeed.

My awareness of cycling has been slowly been ramping up over the past weeks. OLN has scaled back their coverage of the Giro d’ Italia which is a loss. The Giro is as interesting a race as the Tour, even though it doesn’t have Lance Armstrong. In fact, the scenery of the Giro is more compelling to me.

Reading about cycling is also a constant reminder of cultural differences. Bernard Hinault was being interviewed about the upcoming tour. As reported by .:. procycling .:. one of the central issues was why there have been no French victors of the Tour since Hinault’s victory in 1985. This was only marginally interesting to me, but there was this nugget of Gallic wisdom:

Moncoutie needs to learn to ride on the cols as one of the leaders, because when you are behind already, you are only able to pull back time which you have previously lost.

If you are a native English speaker, please try to wrap your mind around this statement. “If you are behind, you are only able to catch up.” Would you ever say that in English? The self-evidence of it makes it pointless to say, and yet somehow Hinault is conveying it as wisdom.

I’m not writing this to slam Hinault, or the French. I’m writing in wonder. Does this sound as obvious to Hinault as it does to me? Is he communicating something by saying it, or is it just a formal requirement of the language, or of Hinault education, personality or stature?

Does anyone know how to easily convert web-based race results into an Excel spreadsheet readable format or import it into Excel?

Excel (2000 on Windows at least) has this wired. It will pull down and convert data from the web automatically.

On a new spreadsheet do:

Data -> Get External Data -> New Web Query

Enter a URL and some config and you are done.

I just set it to pull down all the data for the 40+ men at Wildflower Long Course. For options, I used only the tables and kept no web formatting. The data appeared to be perfectly formated, except for two small issues. Some headers were split over two rows “Swim Time” -> “Swim” in F1 and “Time” in F2, and in the last column, “Club,” longer club names were split over 2 columns. The Wildflower data wasn’t in html tables, they wrapped the whole in pre tags, so if you had data that used tables, I predict that it wouldn’t have these problems.

You can configure the Web Query so that if the results change on the web, then your spreadsheet will change also. Actually that is the default, so if you don’t want it to change underneath you, turn it off.

USAT says that the reason for the split was, “in reaction to WTC’s desire to establish a global rule book for its races that is not in compliance with USA Triathlon’s rules.” WTC, (World Triathlon Corporation) is the parent of IMNA. IMNA says that the move was “an effort to improve existing standards and race-related guidelines.”

WTC is forming a new governing body, the Global Tri Group, Inc. (GTG) to “enhance events worldwide by standardizing rules/regulations, providing insurance assistance and designing programs to implement drug-testing worldwide.”

I sat down to spend five minutes looking at the new GTG rules. It went a little longer than that, and I had to look pretty closely. The rules differences are pretty small in my opinion.

The GTG rules were adapted from the USAT rules. The major difference, GTG makes fewer distinctions between elite and age-group athletes than USAT. The differences between the two sets of rules are summarized in the table below. I didn’t do a line by line comparison, and I pretty much ignored the appeals process and more administrative functions so there may be additional differences. These are mostly race day rules differences.

Some of the differences are my interpretations based on the failure of one set of rules to mention a specific, e.g. USAT doesn’t mention stand-down penalties or penalty marking for age group athletes.

There may also be implementation differences. For instance, there was a racer last year (at the Disney Half?) who was penalized for running without a shirt. This might have been a course specific rule, or it might have been an interpretation of a USAT rule or some such. I don’t see this mentioned specifically in the rules, though, and my understanding is that this is permitted in WTC races, at least in some places.

It would be interesting to have an official’s point of view on these differences, but my take is that they are so insignificant as to throw into doubt the assertions of both USAT and GTG that the reasons for the split were to either “provide the safest races and the fairest competition,” or “enhance events worldwide by standardizing rules/regulations.”

Interesting non-difference: these new GTG rules will prohibit nudity in transition worldwide. I believe this will be a change for Ironman races in other countries. Perhaps that is the standardization that they are talking about.

I had promised that I would write to Glenn Erickson concerning his recommendation to use Kevlar beaded tires because of a theory that the metal in wire beads gets hot and melts the tire. I couldn’t understand why the metal got any hotter than the Kevlar.

I received a very gracious reply from someone who worked for Erickson Cycle Tours. We didn’t specific discuss whether I could use her name, or quote her, so I won’t do either. I’ll just give you jist of her response, which she appears to be relaying from Glenn.

Glenn is unavailable until the fall because he is leading cycling tours in Europe. Not to puff my source, but check out the tours at their web site, fourteen separate tours this summer mostly in France, but also in Austria, Switzerland and Italy. If they thought that by being nice to this random e-mailer that they were going to get me to want to go on one of their tours, they were wrong. I wanted to go on one of their tours way before they responded to my e-mail. Now that they have been so nice, I really want to go on one of their tours.

I don’t merely mention their tours because they look like fun, but they are part of the background empirical data. In all of those tours, this is his twelfth year, Glenn has never seen a Kevlar beaded tire fail in an rim heating/braking situation. That is a pretty substantal claim, based on that experience (plus if you look at his bio, there is more). And although it would be useful to know how many wire beaded tires he has seen fail in these situations and what proportion of riders on his tours ride each, it is a fact that needs to be explained.

His current theory for why this is so isn’t really as quoted by the correspondent to RoadBikeRider Newsletter, that “the wire gets hot and melts the tire,” which if you will recall didn’t make much sense to me. I wondered how the wire got hotter than the rubber. He thinks that the wire can expand from heating which makes more sense.

I don’t however follow him to the next step, that the elongation of the wire allows the tire to roll off the rim. The wire bead on 700 mm rim is about 2.2 meters long (0.7 m x pi) and if the coefficient of expansion of that wire is between 3 and 4 micrometers per meter per degree C, the wire is going to elongate by at most a half millimeter when the temperature goes up 120 C. (There is a theoretical study here [PDF] saying that the maximum temperature on a braking rim is is 100° C.

That half millimeter means that the wire can move 0.25 mm from the rim. I wouldn’t think that would be enough to make a difference. Maybe it is.

Another possibility is that the wire and the rest of the tire (particularly the casing) expand differentially. The hot wire moving in the hot rubber while the whole is under increasing stress from the increasing pressure in the tire could cut the casing or the hot wire could move inside the casing or rubber to accelerate the melting and breakdown of the tire.

Glenn wanted me to know that while he was interested in the science of this failure, he was most interested in safety. I hope he has a great summer.

Updated – Jul 6, 2005 to fix the link to the pdf. Sorry about that.