How To Ride Faster With No Extra Effort

Your tires can make a huge difference to your ride.

As a quick review, countering your effort on the bike are essentially four things:

• air resistance
• gravity
• resistance created in the interaction of your bike with the road (bicycle tire rolling resistance)
• mechanical losses in your drive train (we'll talk about later)

I'll mention air resistance again as it's the most important (last weeks post here). Equipment can make a difference, but the biggest (and free) improvements come with body position. And NEVER ever wear a jacket unless it's pouring rain or bitterly cold (close to freezing) or you just want to make it really hard on yourself.

Bicycle tire rolling resistance. I won't get into the silly 'wider tires roll faster' or tubed versus tubeless here. We're talking about brand and type of tire. Conti Gatorskins are practically bullet proof and so some like to use those or something similar on their bikes. The problem is that using them is like riding with your brakes constantly rubbing. A pair of Conti Gatorskins take 39 watts to overcome rolling resistance. Conti's GP5000S's in the same size take only 20 watts. That's the difference between staying with the group and being blown off. It would take most FOG riders years of dedicated training to gain 19 watts, if they even could.

Gravity and therefore weight almost never plays a role in Manitoba. But if you're going to the mountains, on an 8% grade every kg of weight costs an extra 7 watts. Taking a kg off your bike is thousands of dollars. OTOH losing a kg or two by being mindful about what we eat is usually pretty attainable. Even then switching your tires is easier than losing 3 kg.

I said I'd talk about mechanical losses later, but as a comparison switching to super expensive oversized ceramic bearing pulleys saves about 1.5 watts.

If you're having trouble keeping up maybe changing your tires is an easy answer. Keep the rubber side down and see you on Saturday.