The Climb (Froome's first autobiography)

[Digger]

Froome also pushed the no headwind myth on Ventoux...wonder why

 

[The Hitch]

Wonders will never cease.

Is this true? That there is less drag sitting down vs standing up? Far out. Talk about scientific advancements. I am surprised Sky let Kerrison publicly release such potent and far-reaching advancements in cycling performance gains. Incredible. Surely a tactical blunder!?

Clearly not one of the advancements Contador copied when he and others began to "catch up" on all Sky's super secret techniques.

 

[Benotti69]

Moser used to train on hills by putting it in the biggest gear and trying to power up it all the way in the seat. Didn't make him a climber.........

 

[thehog]

Moser used to train on hills by putting it in the biggest gear and trying to power up it all the way in the seat. Didn't make him a climber.........

Off sea a lot of riders will do that. To build strength.

 

[thehog]

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jul/15/team-sky-chris-froome-tour-de-france

Contradictious in terminus logicus fail...

When will REAL journalists catch up on these kinda contradictions...

Time for our twitter journo Digger...

On,y 5 more sleeps until the book comes out!

 

[Dear Wiggo]

Clearly not one of the advancements Contador copied when he and others began to "catch up" on all Sky's super secret techniques.

I predict that non-Team Sky riders will one day surpass Team Sky rider performances.

 

[GuyIncognito]

Off sea a lot of riders will do that. To build strength.

And have destroyed knees by age 25. See Ignatiev.

 

[thehog]

And have destroyed knees by age 25. See Ignatiev.

Correct. Hence the gear limit ratio in junior races. Think the Italians allow a free for all for their juniors.

Saw a lot of guys in my junior years lose races during the gear roll out post ride.

They'd pull out a long ruler, drop the crank to 6pm and if it rotated over they were disqualified.

 

[LaFlorecita]

Clearly not one of the advancements Contador copied when he and others began to "catch up" on all Sky's super secret techniques.

De Jongh mentioned that Contador was training on sitting down more often on a climb because climbing out of the saddle costs more energy. Not sure if that's because of the drag.

 

[Dear Wiggo]

De Jongh mentioned that Contador was training on sitting down more often on a climb because climbing out of the saddle costs more energy. Not sure if that's because of the drag.

Moreso because you are supporting more of your body weight rather than the bike supporting it via the saddle.

For lighter climbers it's a better style, apparently, and anyone would use it to relieve and stretch muscles out regardless. Plus you can generate more power / better acceleration if you really want to drop someone.

 

[LaFlorecita]

Moreso because you are supporting more of your body weight rather than the bike supporting it via the saddle.

For lighter climbers it's a better style, apparently, and anyone would use it to relieve and stretch muscles out regardless. Plus you can generate more power / better acceleration if you really want to drop someone.

That's what I thought initially, thanks

 

[Fagniniwins]

Moser used to train on hills by putting it in the biggest gear and trying to power up it all the way in the seat. Didn't make him a climber.........

To be fair, Graeme Obree relied on (and may still recommend, haven't read his latest book) the same thing to improve his TTing. No school like the old school.

And have destroyed knees by age 25. See Ignatiev.

Yes, I believe Breschel's career has been hampered by a similar problem.

 

[Fagniniwins]

Moreso because you are supporting more of your body weight rather than the bike supporting it via the saddle.

For lighter climbers it's a better style, apparently, and anyone would use it to relieve and stretch muscles out regardless. Plus you can generate more power / better acceleration if you really want to drop someone.

I'm no pro but I've found that my heart rate also goes up ~8 BPM when standing vs. seated climbing at the same power output. I've also got 6 inches and about 50 lbs on Contador, for instance, so again, no comparison.

The only thing I would be vaguely interested in reading in Froome's puff piece autobiography is a discussion of his positioning on the bike and how it has changed over the years, if at all. If he is even remotely self-aware, he must have seen the BC track alumni spinning away or had it put to him that he devote some effort to looking less like "a preying mantis attacking a coat hanger."

 

[thehog]

Just got The Sunday Times.

Froome's book has been serialised in it once again today with 3 extracts from it.

Here is what he has to say about his attack on Contador on the Ventoux.



By the end of the Ventoux stage he was spat at up to a dozen times during the Tour.

He spoke about Armstong and said with regards to himself that he can't prove his clean but that we won't be fooled again etc ...

There is a section about the Tour of Egypt that I haven't got around to reading yet.

In the video he rides up to Richie, changes gears and goes after standing he just sits. Then he does the same in Quintana.

He is on the gears changing them but I don't agree with with his assessment and it's very different from what was reported in Walsh's book "Inside Sky" on how it was planned during training.

Just more BS from Walsh & Sky.

At least lance kept his BS straight most of the time. These guys just make stuff up and change it by the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52xv2Hg2fkI&sns=em

 

[frenchfry]

De Jongh mentioned that Contador was training on sitting down more often on a climb because climbing out of the saddle costs more energy. Not sure if that's because of the drag.

Interestingly enough the sitting strategy isn't valid during the Vuelta. At least in 2013.

 

[veganrob]

Interestingly enough the sitting strategy isn't valid during the Vuelta. At least in 2013.

Haha, just what I was thinking. Imagine how good Horner could be if he just learned to climb while sitting down.

 

[hfer07]

Most often when climbers make their attacks on a mountain, they do it standing on the pedals to gain the maximum amount of leverage from the arms and upper body. Froome remained seated while making his attack on Contador, however. There is a clear advantage in doing this, Kerrison believes: working in a wind tunnel has shown Sky that there is much less drag when a cyclist remains sitting down. That applies even at relatively low climbing speeds.

Sky keeps reaching new levels on PR rubbish

BTW - Froome's attack wasn't even at the windiest part of the Ventoux to benefit from that "unique" discovery...

 

[peloton]

This is a long one, but kinda telling (from a book many know, mods feel free to edit the chapter)

'Proclaiming my belief that he could win the Tour de France wasn’t my only radical statement I made when we decided to work together.
I also told him he had to change his whole style of pedaling-that he had to, in effect, break the mold of everything he knew about propelling a bike.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Even on a casual ride, a cyclist makes about 80 to ninety pedal strokes to a minute. To use a round number for ease, that’s somewhere around five thousand revolutions every hour. Pros ride for four or five hours a day, so figure twenty-five thousand pedal strokes a day. You can bet they ride two hundred days a year, easy, which puts them around 5 million pedal strokes each year. He had been training and racing since he was 15. That meant that, by the winter, his body had learned to pedal a certain way by repeating the motion about 65 million times.

I had few months to undo that.

I believed that, just as he had often in the past used his raw horsepower to compensate for his lack of experience, he’d relied too much on sheer power in the mountains. If he could learn to spin the pedals faster, he’d be able to take advantage of his super-human aerobic capacity and genetic physical ability-he could ride aerobically while others others suffered and gasped for breath. He’d be able to save those power surges and unleash them in full at key moments, rather than gradually expend that energy.

To accomplish this, he had to retrain his body to spin the pedals at 100-120 rpm while staying seated. His instinct, at this point, was to rise out of the saddle and stomp a hill into submission. All during that long winter and spring, as he rode Europe’s mountains, climb after climb after climb, hour after hour, day after day, I’d follow behind and, when he rose out of the saddle, whisper through the radio that he had to sit back down and spin.
I could see him suffering. I knew that standing up to pedal must have felt good- natural, strong. “Sit,” I’d say into the radio, knowing that my hated command was echoing in his ear. “Spin. High cadence. High cadence.”
He’d sit, and spin his legs faster, and even though sometimes his heart rate would go up, he was sparing his muscles. His body was becoming more efficient. It was working.
“Sit,” I said, over and over, almost like a chant.

It wore on both of us. We each, over the course of that training, grew weary of that routine. I wanted to stop telling him to sit. He wanted to stop hearing it. But we kept it up. We had to. We had to make seated, high-cadence pedaling feel right. One day, he couldn’t bring himself to listen to me anymore. As he settled into yet another climb, he ripped the earpiece away from his head and rode on. I could see the cord swaying free, arcing like a pendulum with the motion of his legs.
The road steepened and he rose out of the saddle. Out of habit, I started to speak into the radio.
He was out of the saddle, attacking the pedals. I laid my palm against the car’s horn. Brrrraaa! Brrrraaa! BRAAAAAA!
He sat back down, then looked over his shoulder. He spun those pedals, around and around.
He rose again, and I blared the horn at him.
He sat. he’d heard me. More important: he’d listened.
The future Tour de France champion spun the pedals as fast as he could.'

Take a wild guess who wrote that.

 

[elduggo]

I am confused how you reach that conclusion from the article.

really? hes trying for the moral high ground, thats how.

 

[elduggo]

Brrrraaa! Brrrraaa! BRAAAAAA!

Take a wild guess who wrote that.

Brrrrraaaaaadley?

 

[Publicus]

This is a long one, but kinda telling (from a book many know, mods feel free to edit the chapter)

'Proclaiming my belief that he could win the Tour de France wasn’t my only radical statement I made when we decided to work together.
I also told him he had to change his whole style of pedaling-that he had to, in effect, break the mold of everything he knew about propelling a bike.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Even on a casual ride, a cyclist makes about 80 to ninety pedal strokes to a minute. To use a round number for ease, that’s somewhere around five thousand revolutions every hour. Pros ride for four or five hours a day, so figure twenty-five thousand pedal strokes a day. You can bet they ride two hundred days a year, easy, which puts them around 5 million pedal strokes each year. He had been training and racing since he was 15. That meant that, by the winter, his body had learned to pedal a certain way by repeating the motion about 65 million times.

I had few months to undo that.

I believed that, just as he had often in the past used his raw horsepower to compensate for his lack of experience, he’d relied too much on sheer power in the mountains. If he could learn to spin the pedals faster, he’d be able to take advantage of his super-human aerobic capacity and genetic physical ability-he could ride aerobically while others others suffered and gasped for breath. He’d be able to save those power surges and unleash them in full at key moments, rather than gradually expend that energy.

To accomplish this, he had to retrain his body to spin the pedals at 100-120 rpm while staying seated. His instinct, at this point, was to rise out of the saddle and stomp a hill into submission. All during that long winter and spring, as he rode Europe’s mountains, climb after climb after climb, hour after hour, day after day, I’d follow behind and, when he rose out of the saddle, whisper through the radio that he had to sit back down and spin.
I could see him suffering. I knew that standing up to pedal must have felt good- natural, strong. “Sit,” I’d say into the radio, knowing that my hated command was echoing in his ear. “Spin. High cadence. High cadence.”
He’d sit, and spin his legs faster, and even though sometimes his heart rate would go up, he was sparing his muscles. His body was becoming more efficient. It was working.
“Sit,” I said, over and over, almost like a chant.

It wore on both of us. We each, over the course of that training, grew weary of that routine. I wanted to stop telling him to sit. He wanted to stop hearing it. But we kept it up. We had to. We had to make seated, high-cadence pedaling feel right. One day, he couldn’t bring himself to listen to me anymore. As he settled into yet another climb, he ripped the earpiece away from his head and rode on. I could see the cord swaying free, arcing like a pendulum with the motion of his legs.
The road steepened and he rose out of the saddle. Out of habit, I started to speak into the radio.
He was out of the saddle, attacking the pedals. I laid my palm against the car’s horn. Brrrraaa! Brrrraaa! BRAAAAAA!
He sat back down, then looked over his shoulder. He spun those pedals, around and around.
He rose again, and I blared the horn at him.
He sat. he’d heard me. More important: he’d listened.
The future Tour de France champion spun the pedals as fast as he could.'

Take a wild guess who wrote that.

That has to be Carmichael talking about Lance. Has to be.

 

[peloton]

That has to be Carmichael talking about Lance. Has to be.

Close but no cigar

 

[Michele]

Moser used to train on hills by putting it in the biggest gear and trying to power up it all the way in the seat. Didn't make him a climber.........

That was the start of training with SFR, Salita Forza Resistenza, still used nowdays.

 

[Jack (6 ch)]

This is a long one, but kinda telling (from a book many know, mods feel free to edit the chapter)

'Proclaiming my belief that he could win the Tour de France wasn’t my only radical statement I made when we decided to work together.
I also told him he had to change his whole style of pedaling-that he had to, in effect, break the mold of everything he knew about propelling a bike.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Even on a casual ride, a cyclist makes about 80 to ninety pedal strokes to a minute. To use a round number for ease, that’s somewhere around five thousand revolutions every hour. Pros ride for four or five hours a day, so figure twenty-five thousand pedal strokes a day. You can bet they ride two hundred days a year, easy, which puts them around 5 million pedal strokes each year. He had been training and racing since he was 15. That meant that, by the winter, his body had learned to pedal a certain way by repeating the motion about 65 million times.

I had few months to undo that.

I believed that, just as he had often in the past used his raw horsepower to compensate for his lack of experience, he’d relied too much on sheer power in the mountains. If he could learn to spin the pedals faster, he’d be able to take advantage of his super-human aerobic capacity and genetic physical ability-he could ride aerobically while others others suffered and gasped for breath. He’d be able to save those power surges and unleash them in full at key moments, rather than gradually expend that energy.

To accomplish this, he had to retrain his body to spin the pedals at 100-120 rpm while staying seated. His instinct, at this point, was to rise out of the saddle and stomp a hill into submission. All during that long winter and spring, as he rode Europe’s mountains, climb after climb after climb, hour after hour, day after day, I’d follow behind and, when he rose out of the saddle, whisper through the radio that he had to sit back down and spin.
I could see him suffering. I knew that standing up to pedal must have felt good- natural, strong. “Sit,” I’d say into the radio, knowing that my hated command was echoing in his ear. “Spin. High cadence. High cadence.”
He’d sit, and spin his legs faster, and even though sometimes his heart rate would go up, he was sparing his muscles. His body was becoming more efficient. It was working.
“Sit,” I said, over and over, almost like a chant.

It wore on both of us. We each, over the course of that training, grew weary of that routine. I wanted to stop telling him to sit. He wanted to stop hearing it. But we kept it up. We had to. We had to make seated, high-cadence pedaling feel right. One day, he couldn’t bring himself to listen to me anymore. As he settled into yet another climb, he ripped the earpiece away from his head and rode on. I could see the cord swaying free, arcing like a pendulum with the motion of his legs.
The road steepened and he rose out of the saddle. Out of habit, I started to speak into the radio.
He was out of the saddle, attacking the pedals. I laid my palm against the car’s horn. Brrrraaa! Brrrraaa! BRAAAAAA!
He sat back down, then looked over his shoulder. He spun those pedals, around and around.
He rose again, and I blared the horn at him.
He sat. he’d heard me. More important: he’d listened.
The future Tour de France champion spun the pedals as fast as he could.'

Take a wild guess who wrote that.

Johan?

(Based on the 'my belief' line).

 

[Benotti69]

Johan?

(Based on the 'my belief' line).

Bill Stapleton or Bill Strickland.