Not to mention brown shoes, black socks and blue jeans, wtf sort of combination is that!

Depends on your definition of half decent, but suspect you’ll have trouble finding anything that remotely fits that description the right side of £40

That sir is a lovely bike, no doubt made all the more lovely by the fact it only cost a competition entry 😀

Hope Mrs bigbloke has accepted being relegated to no2 love in your life!

Paris TT to finish certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world and would make an interesting change from going round and round waiting to see which sprint leadout gets to the final bend first.

If they are going to boo anyway, may as well give them something to boo about 😆

Any intermediate sprints for Landa tomorrow? 💡

@DickBarton, i’ll never understand people complaining about / dodging the parking charges, i find them a bargain for the facilities on offer, and even park there to use the changing rooms if i want to do a road ride in the area.

We all like new trails, and volume(km) of trails for all abilities are a key factor for attracting visitors to not just come for the day, but to stay in the area. I’d love to be able to come and book a cabin for a week and ride 200km of waymarked green/blue/red trails. The current trail network gives no incentive to stay in (or travel a long way to) the area as you can ride it all in a day. To do that needs some sort of sustainable income that can be re-invested into the forest, so hopefully some sort of deal has been struck so the cabins help provide that.

Wow, Bardet totally cooked and dribbling all over himself

Such a great initiative – so many drivers behave like complete tools. Round here there’s a short section of main road (A919) that an under-cover police cyclist would have a very busy day on, as it seems to turn every single driver into a homicidal maniac.

@mrblobby
Lizzie sat up from the start to wait for the two behind, so basically a group of 3 starting 1:30 down over 20k.
But once they got together they appeared to be taking pulls at their individual TT pace rather than properly hard pulls. End result, the group of 3 actually lost time to AVV.

Don’t think the Lizzie group ever fully committed. They weren’t making much effort to get aero when pulling on the front, and didn’t give the appearance of doing full gas pulls either.

Nice work!
Now go do it in a race!

I buy that tesco dark chocolate 4 at a time 😳

Hope there’s some sort of deal whereby the cabins make an ongoing maintenance contribution to the trails.

Agree with @markyboy that new waymarked trails are needed (especially if hoping to entice people to stay in said cabins).

Kwiatkowski has been utterly epic.
This is where SKY really have the advantage, they have so much talent, when some of it misfires (Henao), there’s a good chance someone else will have epic form to compensate.
We saw similar last year from Poels when other members of the team were under-performing.

Agree with @dragon, stages with long valley descents are such a waste of a stage. Have always thought so, and have seen nothing this tour to change my mind.

Come to Fife, weather is totally predictable, it’ll be overcast, cold and most likely windy, but doesn’t actually rain that much.
Was back to a roubaix jersey last night 🙁

Always stop if you are the only one there – your race is not that important.

However if there are marshalls, riding buddies, spectators etc attending, then don’t wait. Only so many people can help a fallen rider.+1
Make sure not to run over the fallen rider on the way past though, that’s bad form.

That said there are two issues here. One is what is the (Kryton’s) right response and two is, what do you think of the snitch?

Well there’s 3 scenarios for the snitch.
One is they are a run of the mill do-gooder that only sees the world in black and white, and for any child to be crying means something bad has happened and action must be taken.
Two is it’s just a woman partaking in their favourite pastime of spreading misery and stirring trouble.
Three is the snitch is called Louise and is trying to break up Mr&Mrs K so she can move in later.

But all three of the above are just differing brands of crazy that can’t be cured, so the correct response is:

don’t over react, take the moral high ground

Start taking other parents hostage and employ waterboarding until one of them cracks, it’s the only sane way to resolve this situation.

One thing you missed in the preview.
Riders need to watch out for wild bees on the Vars, they have a taste for bike riders!

Hoping we don’t get a headwind again today, hoping for some very attacking racing.

46:16 seems massive to me – comes to ~20.5mph at 90rpm.
That’s gonna be some speedy rides to the pub!

Think someone mistakenly added an extra zero to that figure.

Indeed, I had one of those as my first ever road bike – certainly didn’t pay that for it!

The variety of positions on the bike was really surprising. Some so horizontal you could have put a tray of drinks on their back, others sitting up like they were on a shopping bike.

I’ve thought this looking at some event photos – even some riding in giant flappy waterproofs – was a bit mind boggled.

If you have to ride that far, and run a marathon, will you be going fast enough for aero to be a big factor?

Given a smooth flat course and no wind I reckon 17-18mph is not unrealistic whilst preserving myself for the final run. I’ve done a couple of hilly 100mi sportives this year at 16mph basically working as a domestique for slower riders and finished up feeling fairly fresh.
So probably fast enough that aero is worth worrying about, but not exactly setting any records.

£450,000 – £499,999 Matt Baker – Presenter Claudia Winkleman – Presenter

So many levels of wrong.
I’d actually pay extra license fee if I never had to see Claudia ever again.

Can’t imagine there’s actually that big a queue to sign Quintana.
There’s no doubt he’s a hugely talented rider, but maybe doesn’t fit in too easily with most teams.
Doesn’t seem to speak English, which is hardly a sponsors dream, and disappears off to Colombia for months at a time to train rather than integrating with the rest of the squad.
Movistar genuinely seem like the best fit for him, and if they don’t want him any more….

Don’t think Sky will really miss Landa. Assuming he manages to fully recover from knee injury, Poels will be rejoining the queue for a shot at leading a grand tour, and the fact that Thomas has re-signed suggests he’s been promised another shot.

Well the cycling weekly link back up the thread somewhere suggested ~2kph at 200W.
However the Flo link suggested more like ~1kph.

Lots of good stuff so far though. And looking like an aero tri suit could potentially be a good investment

Assuming its some kind of ironman event OP?

Sort of, its more or less an iron distance duathlon.

but it’s not going to save you any significant time if you don’t put the training in

Strava says i’ve managed 248hrs so far this year – hopefully that counts as putting the training in.

Plenty of sweet spot efforts on the turbo is your answer here

That’ll not be happening. Done it in the past, and it gave the worst results of any training i’ve tried. In my opinion sweetspot is best left for time crunched riders and 4-6 weeks or so as a stepping stone to harder efforts. This year i decided to more or less ignore muscular endurance type intervals, and instead focused on the underlying cornerstones of endurance and force, and it’s worked very well.

But regardless of what training I do, this thread is/was about trying to make the most of my meagre supply of Watts.

VERY excited about today’s stage!
Gonna be clock watching until 16:30 then warp speed home to start watching the ITV4 recording.
I feel we may see Contador causing havoc again today – he knows he can’t win, but he can definitely put on a good show.
AG2R looked very strong yesterday, might be in SKY’s best interest to play the Landa card again and make them chase.

@singletrackmind
Easy choice on the tyres for me: GP4000SII
I’m looking for a much better performance than simply finishing, but wont be troubling a podium, so no sense chasing a few watts and risking a visit from the fairy in the process.

Any reason why no aero bars

Not allowed (for stupid reasons that only make sense to the organisers) – although obviously unless its silly windy you can always wrap gel bar tap all the way to the stem and use the elbows on the tops technique.

If they’re banned and the event allows drafting then getting into a quick group

Also not allowed.

Biggest problem i’m having is trying to find quantifiable data at normal speeds. Clearly i’m not going to be spending much time troubling 50km/h!
Got no problem dropping £150 on an aero helmet for example if its going to make some decent gains, but for 1min on a 12hr event not so much.

http://flocycling.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/flo-cycling-how-much-time-will-flo.html?m=1

That looks a bit like what i’m after, will get a good look at it this evening.

Everyone is different, and has different powers of recovery, but office work is not really rest.
I can tolerate about 5 hours a week more training when on holiday and resting properly compared to being at work. (I’m a software engineer, so not what would be described as an active job).

The moral of this story is that much like children, FUH (fat ugly husbands) should be seen but not heard?

Good start, but one episode just isn’t enough.
Roll on next week

Nothing jumping out in terms of fit, just looks to me like you have mahoosive arms with no elbow joints. 😆

Joking aside, look at the rider beside you in the photo above, slight bend in the elbow, makes a significant difference.
Same thing in the photo further up the page, two riders behind have a nice bend in the elbow.

Doesn’t come naturally at all to some people, but well worth concentrating on, as i’ll bet you are costing yourself 20+W @ 25mph.

Good time to work on it is during interval sessions, then it sort of becomes natural that when you are going hard you instinctively get aero too.

For those like me upset about the demise of the krylion carbon, you’ll be glad to know they were re-badged as pro4 endurance.
The bad news is that pro4 endurance are also technically discontinued and they drift in/out of stock in different sizes/colours.

Sorry, missed this thread for a few days.

@aracer, what is unreasonable about climbing at 90rpm?

You wouldn’t ride a flat time trial at 70rpm, so why would you do it on a climb? Long climbs at low cadence is either some wierd self harming fetish or over-geared.

Edit: And 3.5W/kg was loosely based on 80rpm.

CH up there adopting the position you use when out riding with weaker riders to give them the most shelter possible behind you 😆

What @greentricky said. If you’ve gone properly hard you wont be able to do anything but easy for a few days anyway.

@eskay, it may be old fashioned, but only slightly outdated, and it still forms the bulk of what pro cyclists, runners and rowers do. There was an interview with one of the GB womens rowing crews at the last Olympics, and they basically said they knew exactly what the coach was going to prescribe every morning – long easy row. And thats targetting an event that lasts less than 10mins.

@OP, if you are dead set against that type of training you could check out ‘The time crunched cyclist’. It’s worked well for many cyclists, and is largely responsible for the ‘sweetspot’ craze, but doesn’t scale well to those with a higher training volume, and there’s a few horror stories floating round the web of people burning out after trying to scale it up.

What nath said.
Read the book, decide some goals a bit more specific, bake your own plan based on the book.
Might not be 100% bang up to date with the very latest knowledge, but will let you build a solid plan thats easily as good as anything pre-baked you can download.

@butcher – as above, start with a copy of friels training bible, some of it is a bit old, and he’s in the process of re-writing it, but a great amount of basic training theory in there.

Then you can move onto googling polarised training, which advocates large volumes of low intensity work, and is widely used by pro’s across all endurance sports.

My take on it is that with less than 8hrs a week to train, you can add more intensity, but accept your focus will be on shorter events.
For those with more hours available targetting longer events, then two HARD sessions a week and the rest made up of z1/2 and skills work.

Edit: If you can find a pro to follow on strava that doesn’t strip out their power data it gives an interesting insight. I was following Steven Kruijswijg for a while before he started stripping his data out, and he spent the vast majority of his time rolling round in z1.