Daily Commute

According to today's NYT, it looks like LA is doing some serious planning for an attack on the hour record.

hair07

i'm confused: why would anyone do 2 attempts, let alone 2 attempts separated by only a few weeks?

DieselDan

Is the first one a warm up?

Guest

Any way you could post the article so we don't have to register with yet another newspaper?

Thanks!

Koffee

Xtrmyorick

It's pretty much standard to set up several times to attempt the hour record. You have to have officials there to verify your distance, and it's not like you can just call them up the night before and ask them to come out. Plus, you're basically saying "here's the exact date/time/place where I'm going to set a new world record." If you asked a marathon runner to pick a specific time and place to set a new record, they'd think you're crazy. By setting multiple dates, it's not an all or nothing proposition. If his legs just don't feel great the first time, he's got another shot at it.

rich007

So Many Miles to Cover and So Little Time to Do It
By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: January 24, 2005

SOLVANG, Calif., Jan. 20 - On a sunny Southern California afternoon, a crowd gathered in a hotel parking lot here to watch Lance Armstrong and his team complete its daily six-hour training ride.

Though it appears to be a solo effort, bicycle racing is clearly a team sport. In Armstrong's case that team effort extends to an informal group known as F-One, an array of sports physiologists, computer engineers, aerodynamicists, as well as bicycle, helmet and clothing designers, which met for the first time this year on Thursday.

Indisputably the world's best cyclist, Armstrong, the six-time winner of the Tour de France, has been hinting broadly that he might take a year hiatus from the event he has dominated since 1999. He has also speculated that his next goal may be a sporting challenge virtually unknown in the United States until now.

For the rest of the world, however, the Hour Record, as it is known, holds as much magnetism as ascending Mount Everest. The object is for a solo rider to ride as far as possible in 60 minutes on a banked velodrome.

The record was first set in 1893 by the Tour de France founder, Henri Desgrange, with a mark of 21.95 miles. Since then, many of the world's cycling greats have taken turns assaulting the standard. Chris Boardman of Britain, a time-trial specialist, most recently set a mark of 30.721 miles in Manchester, England, in May 2000.

The event is attractive to Mr. Armstrong because it plays to many of his strengths: he is domineering in time trials, a category he has defined by his ability to produce extraordinary amounts of pedaling power over long periods.

"I think it would be an amazing spectacle," said Morris Denton, an executive for Advanced Micro Devices, one of Mr. Armstrong's sponsors. "If you look at the crowds Lance draws in the United States and you think about what would happen if you put some kind of marketing effort behind this event, it would be immense."

Mr. Armstrong has said he will not announce his intentions until April at the earliest. However, the plotting began here last week in a windowless hotel conference room for an attack on the Hour Record.

Johan Bruyneel, who is the coach of Mr. Armstrong's team, and Bart Knaggs, the president of his sports management company, Capital Sports and Entertainment of Austin, Tex., assembled the group to begin discussing the complex strategy and design issues that need to be solved.

Mr. Knaggs made clear to the group in his opening comments that no decision had yet been reached on which races Mr. Armstrong would attempt this year.

"Right now it's an idea," he said. "It's a four-minute-mile kind of thing, but we don't have it on the calendar yet."

The colorful history of the event is divided between an "athlete's record" originally set at 30.71 miles on a traditional track bike by the Belgium cycling legend Eddie Merckx in Mexico City in October 1972, and another record set using the most advanced technology.

The Merckx record went unchallenged until Francesco Moser broke it in January of 1984 at 31.57 miles, using a technologically advanced bicycle and a radical aerodynamic position.

Mr. Boardman then set the record of 35.029 miles in September 1996 in Manchester, only to have the Union Cycliste Internationale, the bicycle racing sports organization, set new rules in an effort to rein in the pace of technology.

Now, Mr. Armstrong must decide which record he wants to break.

"You have a philosophical decision to make," said Jay T. Kearney, a sports physiologist who is a vice president at Carmichael Training Systems, a company in Colorado Springs that oversees Mr. Armstrong's training regimen each year.

That is not the only decision the F-One group is faced with. In a presentation before the group last week, Mr. Kearney laid out a matrix of variables, each of which could have a drastic impact on Mr. Armstrong's chances.

For example, while Mr. Boardman set his records at sea level, Merckx rode at a velodrome at high altitude in Mexico City. In detailed charts, Mr. Kearney showed the group how moving the challenge to higher altitude significantly cuts air resistance, making it easier for a rider to go faster. The benefit of lowered air resistance is balanced by the decline in maximum oxygen uptake, which declines at altitude, even for elite athletes like Mr. Armstrong.

Air pollution, or even a cheering audience exhaling carbon dioxide in an enclosed stadium can have a measurable effect on rider performance, Mr. Kearney told the group.

In Las Vegas during a recent appearance at a media event, Mr. Armstrong showed a keen interest in the Hour Record. He rattled off the distance that Boardman had gone in his 2000 "athletic" attempt to the one-hundredth of a kilometer. He suggested that one exciting way to try to capture the record would be to make a first attempt at sea level in Madison Square Garden. Two weeks later, he would tackle the event at a higher altitude, perhaps in Salt Lake City in a sporting center that is a favorite of speed skaters and has produced many records for that sport.

At the meeting here on Thursday, the F-One design effort was just beginning.

"You need to tell me whether you need 60 days, 120 days or 500 days to be ready," Mr. Knaggs told the group.

In addition to thinking about the possibility of the Hour Record, each representative made progress reports on preparations for the new Discovery Communications Pro Cycling team, which replaces Mr. Armstrong's United States Postal Service sponsor this year.

The F-One group is made up of Carmichael Training Systems; Giro, the helmet maker; Nike; Trek bicycles; the wheel builder Hed Cycling Products; the computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices; and the aerodynamicist Len Brownlie.



I'm putting a link here, so I don't violate copyright policies (as it is a case with many Internet-based forums... ):

LINK HERE...

MacMan

Obree did 2 attempts. Only he didn't wait a few weeks between rides. He did the second one the day after his first. And broke the record on a home-made bike made from washing-machine parts

DieselDan

Sadly, Obree's Record Hour runs were changed to Hour Event records due to a change in UCI rules dictating bike specs.

DXchulo

Looks like the two attemps are there so he can play with the whole high altitude/low altitude thing.

Guest

Thanks for the link!

However, if he does it in such a glittery-glitzy way in Madison Square Gardens, I swear, my eyes will be rolling so hard they will probably leave my head, roll down the street, out onto Lake Michigan, and into Canada. I can just see it now... uuugh.

I hope he goes for it. It would certainly be a change for him, and I'd be interested to see him do it. I think it would be more challenging to do at higher altitudes, so I hope he chooses a higher altitude.

Koffee

hair07

and drank yak's milk.

so you think if he broke it the first time, he'd cancel the 2nd attempt? i'd have tremendous respect for anyone who attempted to increase their own record.

i'd really like to see armstrong try, and i'd love to see him succeed. whaddaya think odds are on his advancing the record?

pjbaz

I hope he shoots for it at MSG...I will make it a mission to be there. Since I live about 90 miles outside the city it shouldn't be too hard. I can't imagine it will be too hard to get at least one seat in MSG for a guy riding a bike in circles.

PJ

Laggard

Here's a nice story on Merckx's hour record:

https://www.torelli.com/home.html?htt...ddyhour.html&1

Merckx said that the hour record ride was "the hardest ride I have ever done" and that it's something that no man wants to do twice.

rich007

I'll be camping out in front of the MSG as long as it takes just to get in... I live less than a mile from there...

pedal

If Lancy pants goes for it in MSG, I would fly to NY just for that. I'll never live down my regret of never seeing MJ play basketball. I still have a chance with LA.

Guest

If you want to see MJ play, let me know the next time you're in Chicago. If he shows up at the club, I'll get you a pass. He's always doing a pickup game there when he's in town. He's still got it.

Koffee

NeoBinary

Do you think he should do it in private?

Guest

No. I'd like to see him do it on a track, like here in Northbrook at the velodrome or someplace like that.

Koffee

EventServices

The track has to be UCI-approved.
Koffee, I always enjoy your posts, but Northbrook is something like 401 meters long, and has almost no seating.
This event will be huge. And its impact on track cycling could be huge, too...if done right.

It would be cool if every track in the US established its own Hour Record.
I challenge anyone to ride for an hour on our 200m merry-go-round.

2Rodies

In this months Cycle Sport they have a brief note about a Doc that has a computer program that has LA beating Chris Boardmans record by 2k. The scenario is that Lance will attempt it at altitude while CB's record was done at sea level. This part had me confused:
What is the advantage (if there is one) of attempting this at altitude as opposed to sea level. The air is thinner at higher elevations making it harder to breath so wouldn't it make more sense to attempt this in denser air? Is the less dense air that much more of an advantage to drag?

gcasillo

I don't think that ticket in MSG is going to be that easy, if the public is even offered any. Aren't most attempts at the hour record done in semi-seclusion, i.e. not in front of a big crowd?

I'd say he could probably fill a healty sized dome for this sort of thing. We Americans love our big, one-time events.

gcasillo

I don't know the exact numbers, but I remember reading something about the amount of effort required to continue accelerating on a bike. Essentially, the faster you go, the harder it becomes to get that extra 1 mph because of drag.

MacMan

The UCI had a hard-on for Obree from the get-go. Bastards.

rich007

That's why he wants to do two, IMO... One for the sport and all interested to see him brake the Hour record... The article mentions that the presence of so many people exhaling CO2 into air can affect his performance negatively... OTOH, don't forget how much roaring thunder, noise, and applause the MSG can generate motivating Lance even further, not that he needs it ...

The second one, at altitude in Colorado, will be a closed event on a newly designed and built track just for the purpose of the hour ride, and he will break the MSG record by a decent amount...

Then again, these are just my speculations...

Or, he might just two rides to brake both records, one UCI-sanctioned, on a traditional bike, and the other, non-UCI, on some kind of technical wonder bike...

Laggard

https://ida.physik.uni-siegen.de/menn/hourrec.htm