Understanding the Cyborg Cyclist

Have you ever heard of the fallacy of faulty analogy?

This fallacy consists in assuming that because two things are alike in one or more respects, they are necessarily alike in some other respect. (source)

Certainly, we’ve all heard faulty analogies employed, and most of us will be guilty of using them ourselves. Here’s a good example:

People who have to have a cup of coffee every morning before they can function have no less a problem than alcoholics who have to have their alcohol each day to sustain them. (ibid)

The world of sport and sports physiology is no less guilty of the fallacy of faulty analogy than the world of neuroscience, which presents the human brain as analogous to the computer. Suffice it to say that this analogy becomes more and more mendacious every day.

Sports physiology is founded upon western cultural conceptions of the mind-body relationship that emanate from Judeo-Christianity: mind/soul, body, which is typically referred to as mind-body dualism. This was a topic that drew quite a lot of my interest while in university, and was central to the thesis I wrote for my M.A. in Communications Studies:

Since Descartes, the human body has been conceived as a mechanical assemblage, an automaton with a soul directing it. Mechanical parts are not volitional. Analogously, human ‘parts’ are not volitional. Thus, we do not speak of certain bodily functions as directed by our will. We don’t say, “I healed my finger,” but “My finger healed”. We speak as though our bodies were indeed assemblages of automatic mechanical components. For [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, it is not “a question of a mind or spirit coming down from somewhere else into an automaton; this would still suppose that the body itself is without an inside and without a ‘self’” (1964: 163). We ‘have’ bodies that regulate, heal, and restructure themselves, and at the same time, we ‘are’ our bodies. (Surch, 23)

In case you’re not up on your Descartes, he was a devout Christian (eventually), and a great deal of his work as a founder of the scientific method was oriented around reconciling spirituality and the mind/body connection.

While many of his hypotheses died with him, Descartes’ mechanicism continues to be influential today. The core of Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy is that it is a “way to isolate systems, and within them mechanisms, as simple as possible, whose operation, even if not described by quantitative relations, was intuitively evident in just the way that the operations of everyday tools are evident. As in the practice of building machines, those mechanisms would be portable, reusable, interchangeable” (des Chene 2001: 87). In light of this understanding of mechanicism, we can see how fears associated with technologies overtaking and replacing human activities might creep into popular consciousness. (Surch 23).

It shouldn’t be difficult to conjure examples of ways Descartes’ mechanistic physiology playing out in modern sports. Athletes are often trained and coached in ways that treat the human body as a ‘machine’ that requires fuel, and will produce specific ‘outputs’ in response to specific ‘inputs.’

In cycling, technologies that quantify performance have supplanted keen attention to sensations, yielding what has been referred to as a ‘robotic’ riding and racing. Honestly, it makes me cringe a bit whenever I hear riders say: ‘The numbers were good.’

The rise of power quantification, in particular, has unfolded in parallel to developments in bicycle frame materials, design, and construction that also lean toward aspects of bicycle performance that lend themselves to quantification. If a brand’s marketing team’s job is to valorize an indicator of a bicycle’s performance they feel they can compete on particularly well, that indicator will be elevated. For example: frame weight. If a given brand is able to build a frame that is exceptionally light, it is in their interest to weave a story around light-weight being the most important indicator of bicycle performance. If riders can be convinced that light-weight trumps all other aspects, positioning a specific product as ‘best in class’ isn’t a leap of faith, it’s a statement of ‘fact.’ But what if light-weight isn’t the most important thing?

Light-weight isn’t the most important thing.

No one aspect of bicycle design, manufacturing and performance is ‘the most important thing.’ The bicycle is a dynamic system, and the devil is in the details. But marketing teams have a hard time with nuance, sensations, vibes, intangibles.

A given bike might be ‘optimal’ for a given rider on a Monday, and sub-optimal on the following Sunday. Or it might even shift from ‘optimal’ during the first hour of a race into ‘sub-optimal’ during the fourth. Think about how much a bicycle’s ‘optimal’ varies across 12 months of a year, when body composition, flexibility, fitness, and posture fluctuate significantly!

More and more, if you listen to interviews with young racers, you’ll pick up on many of them speaking about having a hard time riding to ‘sensations,’ and needing to ride to the wattage numbers on their screens. Without a strong base of experience understanding sensations as the context for metrics, it isn’t surprising these riders are less sensitive to the ride characteristics of their bikes than those from pre-power meter cohorts. The more sensing riders are known to cover up the power numbers on their computers during races, so that they ride to sensations and intuition more than metrics.

Whereas older riders would often speak of their ability to ‘make power’ on a given bike, a dynamic comprised of their form on a given day, and the way their bike ‘resonated’ with their cadence and power output, riders in the modern era tend to speak in one of the two following ways: “I had good legs” or “I didn’t have good legs.”

Planing: It’s a thing.

Having good legs is contingent on the phenomenon Jan Heine refers to as 'planing' . In a blog post from 2014, Jan describes the human body as a dynamic 'power source' upon a bicycle. However, right away, the human body / machine analogy is nuanced, pulling away from the path of the faulty analogy fallacy.

The way the machine (bicycle) receives power feeds back into the source of the power. This is profoundly UNLIKE the manner in which an engine delivers power to a drive train.  Engines don't tire; they run out of fuel. Machines don’t wonder if they should keep doing what they’re doing, do it harder, or easier. Machines don’t get bored or amped. Screaming spectators along the sidelines don’t affect them either.

In my view, the machine/engine dynamic is the fundamental misconception large bicycle companies perpetuate in the marketing copy that espouses the structural design and construction of their products. They lead consumers to believe that the most efficient bicycle system is the one that deflects the least under pedaling load. Test apparata quantify their claims., and riders are thus conditioned / brainwashed into believing that the stiffest platform is the fastest platform. And cycling media are notorious for honing in on this factor, alongside weight, in evaluating test bikes. Light, stiff, vertically compliant!

Heine’s experiments with bicycles constructed with various flex profiles yield the following findings: stiffer and lighter bikes are not faster by virtue of being lighter and stiffer than otherwise identical bikes. Rather, they seem to fatigue the rider sooner (due to lack of yielding to the power input), reducing the overall power available for propulsion.

To break this down, briefly, each pedal stroke is delivered imperfectly across the vertical plane. In other words, as one pushed the pedal down, they also drive the pedal inboard at the bottom of the pedal stroke. A skilled rider will intuitively increase the angle of their frame along the vertical plane to increase side-loading as their power output approaches the limit of their capability. This is accomplished by snaking the front wheel, effectively swerving. This technique is particularly evident in the modern era, as riders tend to ride bikes that are significantly stiffer than those of the steel era. Riders like Jens Voigt demonstrate this technique rather clearly, and higher cadences coupled with lower gears are also ‘symptoms’ of the ‘too stiff’ frame situation.

Heine evaluates performance on a titanium bike does not harmonize with his body's pedaling rhythm, but instead loads his legs with lactic acid prematurely. He is not able to produce as much power on the lighter, stiffer bike as its heavier, more flexible steel counterpart.

One might blame perceptual bias, but I suspect Heine's protocols are sound. Heine and his co-tester, Mark, ride steel bikes a lot. They are attuned to the rhythm and resonance of 'flexy flyers.' They know how to work with them. The both believe they are fast bikes, and prove it by riding them fast. On stiffer bikes they are less efficient. At the same time, riders who have grown up riding stiff bikes believe they are faster. These riders are attuned to the resonance of stiff bikes, and feel slower on bikes that yield more to their input.

The paradoxical thing is that in the end, the prophesy might be self-fulfilling.

Feeling slower can mean you are slower; the rider's perception of speed versus effort can either enhance or diminish their power output. That is, if you feel like a hero, you can eke out more power. In contrast, if you feel like a 'zero,' access to your power will be diminished; you will undermine your ability. Cue the excuses.

PRO racers probably really are faster on ultra stiff bikes than they would be on lively rigs constructed from steel or any other material. At least, for a while…. All it would likely take would be one excellent performance on a flexier bike to convince a rider that it wasn’t a detriment. A poorly-kept secret within the PRO ranks used to be that most of them rode steel bikes during the off-season and/or planned to get custom steel bikes to ride in their retirement. This might be becoming less and less common now that larger tires are becoming mainstream, allowing riders to tune comfort much more with tire volume than was possible in the 23mm tire era.

It would be fascinating to involve PRO racers in the same experiment Heine undertook, something Josh Poertner did when working on developing Zipp’s carbon wheels. Josh has spoken extensively about his battles with perception bias in the early years of carbon wheel testing, which laid the foundation of our current ‘normal’ with respect to high performance wheels: they are all carbon rimmed, and I can’t imagine a PRO wanting to race on anything else. Could it be that data-driven cycling could circle around to yield more flexible bikes in the PRO ranks?

Comfort matters

It’s hard to say what’s ideal for PRO road racers these days, not least because races are increasingly being contested on descents, which was almost unheard of even 15 years ago. Bicycle design and ride characteristics are always about compromises, and it only makes sense that experienced riders will vye toward bikes they feel are best suited to helping them survive harrowing situations over bikes that offer degrees of additional pedaling performance, which is rarely a matter of life and death. But since PROs don’t get custom bikes, they really have to make the most of off-the-shelf models their sponsors want to promote, don’t they? They adapt to what they’re given.

Long-distance rando masters like Jan Heine probably really are faster on flexy bikes, irrespective of whether they weigh 16 or 24lbs. Over the years, having experimented with 650b x 42mm tires, as commonly used by randonneurs, I’ve learned that in the absence of adrenaline and outside the buzz of short competitive events, comfort has more to do with how we make power on the bike than anything else.

‘Comfort,’ in this context, doesn’t mean ‘a cushy ride.’ It means the absence of nagging pain that distracts us from our effort, and makes us doubt our ability to keep doing what we want to do on the bike. Pain in the neck, the hands, the feet, the lower back, the legs. These pains beg the question: ‘Do I have what it takes to do what I’ve set out to do?’ And 42mm tires absorb so much vibration the body would otherwise have to absorb; it’s hard to explain how much fresher one can feel on tires like this compared to lower volume 700c tires. And I’m not talking about 28mm tires alone; the difference can be felt between 35mm tires and 42s. 48mm tires are next level.

Comfort on the bike translates confidence, one’s sense of ‘I can’, and determines the amount of tension we introduce into our bodies in the form of fear, anxiety and worry about whether we’re able to do what we want to do.

BUT.

Nothing is that simple. The importance of comfort on the bike falls across a spectrum, and is bound up with expectations, which emanate from the confluence of personal history and the multitude of influences one is exposed to within cycling culture. For example, one rider might have always experienced discomfort around their sit bones while riding, and hold the belief that this is typical for all cyclists. Therefore, the expectation would be that during a ride of 3 hours, a certain amount of pain would manifest and ‘that’s normal.’ If ‘normal,’ there’s nothing to change, and the sensation isn’t necessarily distracting.

Another variant on the relative unimportance of comfort is that of high intensity racing disciplines, where one’s ability to progress is tied to one’s ability to accept intense pain as part of the process. Track and cyclocross are renowned for being very painful, because they tend to be short enough to ride at power outputs that create a lot of lactate, which is metabolized for energy. This hurts, and the name of the game is to stay in that ‘hurt locker’ for as long as required. Enduring this pain is literally the name of the game, and this sensation dominates one’s experience, pushing other bio-feedbacks out of one’s realm of perception. In other words, if you’re going hard enough everything hurts and all that matters is finishing the task as soon as possible in order to end the pain. The more a rider comes to terms with self-inflicted pain - which involves some pretty crazy mental gymnastics…. - the less energy-wasting tension they create in response to that pain.

The key to cycling well, which is true for any sport or physical practice, is to be at once loose and relaxed while also being strongly, securely poised.

This concept is perhaps best articulated in the rubric of kettlebell practice (@20:00). If you’d like a cycling example, study the manner in which Peter Sagan and Mathieu Van der Poel ride their bikes. In them you will see the epitome of relaxed, fluid strength and power.

To see what I’m talking about with respect to MVDP, focus on his shoulders as you watch him ride.

A ‘comfortable bike’ is one that allows us to make the power we want to make for the duration we want to make it.

It should be clear by now that comfort is a relative term. To illustrate further, consider a road bike used for criterium racing around one hour long. A criterium is raced at high intensity and power, mostly in the drops, with a lot of visual stimulation being processed and decisions being made. This is a high cognitive and physical load scenario, which means sensations are more macro than micro. The bike needs to feel good in relation to surgy power loads, quick handling maneuvers, transitions in and out of the saddle, hard cornering, and sprints. Under high power outputs, the rider’s hips only lightly load the saddle, rendering a given bike more ‘comfortable’ than when ridden at a lower power output, with more weight taken by the sit bones than the legs. So 25mm tires might feel fine during a crit, but brutally harsh on a mellow road ride, simply because of how the bike is being ridden. And handling that feels direct and planted while battling through a crit might feel overly sensitive in crosswinds while riding down alpine descents.

Contrast the crit against a 20km climb, solo, where it’s just about rider, effort and road. Minute sensations are elevated to monstrous. AND, because power output during a long climb, or any endurance performance, is relatively low, a frame that is well suited to that power output will be one that takes on inboard pedaling load and returns it to the rider as if a spring, rather than ‘push back’ against this load and/or fail to return the load at the right frequency to harmonize with the rider’s cadence. A comfortable bike for long climbs will be easy to steer at slow speeds, stable in crosswinds, and responsive to rider input when adjusting for pitch changes. A rather flexible bike will feel best under a rhythmic, steady power output on a climb like this, but be something of a handful to manage if attacking the descent. It is thus necessary to ‘ride to the bike’ on the descent, as we’d ‘ride to our tires’ if riding a cyclocross bike off-road. This means riding the bike as it needs to be ridden, not as one might wish it to ride. In the case of a very flexible bike, weight shifts should be smooth, and the bike should be asked to flow through the turns, versus slammed.

Real-world Experience

I used to suspect that ‘flexy’ bikes worked better for me than stiff ones, but I wasn’t really sure until I spent a couple months on an ultra-oversize steel tubed demo road bike years ago. I didn’t feel I was able to make power well on the bike, and it only felt good under max load, as in a sprint. I got by butt kicked on a few rides on that bike, and ended up hating it. I decided it was way too stiff, significantly stiffer than my old aluminum Cannondale road bike!

Since that experience, I’ve ridden many different bikes, and I’ve been fascinated to learn that some of my aluminum bikes have actually been rather compliant, despite their oversized tubes, and every frame material can fall anywhere across the spectrum in terms of stiffness. My Cervelo S5, for example, was not a ‘stiff’ bike at all, and it planed really well for me in all situations. Its one shortcoming was sprinting; I never really cared. In contrast, my carbon Brodie Romax is my stiffest bike, suited to loading it up for bikepacking. It takes a little getting used to, but I know how to get great performance out of it, based on years of adapting my pedaling for different frames and also tuning tires and pressure to yield the planing feel I want.

My titanium T-Lab is the most fascinating bike I’ve ridden, as it has the most lively feel, which means it planes better than any other bike I’ve ridden, and tends to make me feel like I can and should dig in harder and harder as I roll along. It’s not the bike I’d choose first for criteriums, but it is the first bike I’d choose to ride 200k.

When you get down to the bottom of the matter, there is no one set of design parameters that is ideal for ALL riders. A great bike is one that the rider feels comfortable, stable and fast on, regardless of how that is accomplished. If you want to change it up, you are going to have to be willing to take the time to get intimate with a new platform in order to get the most from it.

In the final analysis, I would contend that the fastest bike for a given rider is that which harmonizes with the rider's beliefs and abilities, neither of which are static.

This said, 23mm tires really are slower than 25s on the road. (Note, this was a controversial statement in 2013!).

The original iteration of this post was published in February, 2013. You can access that post here, along with a few comments from that year. A lot has changed since 2013, a lot hasn’t.