Some interesting cadence/pacing studies

Hmmm.... so "going out easy" will help your bike time, but "coming home easy" will help your run time.

So, how much of each will lead to the optimum brick time?

It's a calculus (or at least algebra) problem, folks!

thanks for the links.

If I read the first abstract right, they used 15% less (or more) of the "self-selected" STARTING pace (minutes 1-4).  That is, not (necessarily) 15% less than the anticipated (or observed) overall pace. 

For example, it may be that athletes tend to start out harder and then 'settle-in' (actually fairly common).  If that's the case, then having them go 15% easier may produce a more steady ride.  Whereas having them go 15% harder pushes them to a level that makes it more difficult to recover at their TT pace.

Not sure what to make of the 2nd, but it does seem interesting.

Last one is also interesting in that it seems to support a lower cadence strategy than most use.

Probably need more work on both those last 2 to make any firm conclusions on race strategy, though.

Thanks for the links.

Another discussion on these prompted the observation that the 2nd study would seem to be borne out by the times at IMFl, which is a very flat course, and thus has very steady state type rides.

John

I only had time to look at one of them right now and chose the second.  Definitely interesting.

A few questions I'd have:

1.  How relevant is run time to exhaustion for racing?  For example, they were running, on average, roughly 5:45 miles for around 15:00.  That doesn't even get them through a 5K (though the authors of the study say that they chose the parameters to simulate a sprint tri, apparently they didn't quite get there, at least for some of the triathletes who participated in the study).  I would have been more interested to see what their actual 5K pace looked like after the cycling.  Maybe the two -- time to exhaustion and 5K pace -- are strongly correlated?  But I wouldn't be surprised if the correlation was weak enough to cause some interpretive problems for the study.  I would also guess - but it is guessing! -- that the correlation gets weaker for longer distances.

2.  It seems to me that there is a gigantic gap between their hypothesis and their testing protocol.  They hypothesize that the final 5 minutes of lower power is what allowed the triathletes to go longer on the run test.  But of course the protocol was 5 on, 5 off, for the entire time.  At the very least, it seems that they need two other protocols:  constant, except 5 off at the end; 5 off, 5 on, ending ON for the final 5 minutes.

3.  I'm very skeptical of their statistical methodology.  I'm not saying that the results are not significant.  I'm saying that they haven't shown them to be.  One problem (among others -- e.g., the sample size is borderline even for a T-test, and the required hypothesis of statistical independence is very hard to verify, despite their good efforts on this point) is that apparently they used (estimated) S.D. across the entire population to determine statistical significance.  They pretty much HAD to do this, because they have only one 'CON' and one 'VAR' test for each participant (in addition to the two initial tests to measure baseline variables -- but these don't help with this issue).  But it seems to me that there is very little reason to believe that one person's S.D. for a time to exhaustion test will be anything like another's.  After all, surely some people are just more consistent in their ability to maintain a fixed pace for a given time than others (all the more so since the point of exhaustion was determine voluntarily by the participants).  We just don't know, from the data that we see, whether the variation isn't plausibly explained by some of the participants' being particularly unpredictable in their perofrmance on time to exhaustion tests.

It's easy to poke holes in studies, of course, but on the other hand, that's how we learn.  Thanks for posting the links.  I hope to be able to read the others soon.



Edited by Experior 2009-07-01 2:44 PM