Originally Posted by
Wilmingtech
Ben -
Thanks for the feedback. In the original post you quoted, I meant sliding the seat forward (up towards the bars not up in the air). Reading back I can certainly see how that can be misinterpreted.
The ride I went on was a 6500' climb up to Mt. Saint Helen's. In this climb there is a 15 mile pull that is no less than 6%? Often I saw 8%. While I live in a hilly area I dont have any long climbs like that to train on unless I get on the turbo with Rouvy or something like that.
So my thinking was to close the distance from the seat to the bottom bracket thus getting more of my weight over the pedals for the long slog. Then by dropping to 172 5s on the cranks it would be easier to spin and keep my cadence up while doing that climb and at the same time slightly decreasing the pedal stroke to make up for some of the slide forward over the bottom bracket.
I did slide my seat forward the 1/2 cm. It did help with pushing down on the pedals and I felt that it did take away a bit from the pull at the bottom of my pedal stroke. It also made good use of my satorius muscles and they were pretty mad at me by the end of the day.
I did not get a chance to swap out the cranks for this ride although in hindsight I wish I had because I struggled to keep a cadence above 65 rpm on some of the hardest parts of the climb and I feel that would have helped.
The thing that would have helped most overall would have been properly training for the ride. Because of my work schedule leading up to it I wasnt able to ride for almost 10 days in a row and when I finally did get back on the bike, it was crammed into a short amount of time and not enough of it pulling 220 watts for 15 miles.
-Sean
Wrong. It would have been worse. Longer cranks would have helped. If you want to use shorter cranks to spin faster, you have to gear a lot lower, low enough that spinning the longer cranks at that rpm would feel like you were thrashing your legs, say 90+ cadence. Dropping crank length 5mm won't even be noticeable at that cadence except that you'd be even slower and cadence would drop because you wouldn't have the muscle power to move the cranks any faster. Except really, you probably wouldn't notice particularly except that you legs would be even more tired.
Moving your saddle forward and thus limiting your ham and glute use is really counterproductive. The longer the climb, the more you want to spread the muscular effort around.
Regear your bike so that climbing that grade, you're spinning ~80 in your second lowest gear. A bailout gear would have been nice, huh? You can use an online gear and cadence calculator to see what that gearing would be.
Odd that your sartorius muscle would become sore. Do your knees stay right over your pedals when you push down and not wobble? Never had that happen - usually my whole quads are quite evenly sore, even to the touch sometimes.