Wheel sucks and algorithms

Now that the warm weather is gone and I’m setting up the winter bike with fenders, trying to find my neoprene shoe covers and letting the hair grow back on my legs, I find myself pondering the lessons learned from another summer on the road. These may be universal or perhaps they’re unique to my experience. If they are not instructional, I hope they are at least entertaining.

I learned that if you go for a solo ride of more than two hours, it is inevitable that a slower rider will try to draft you. If you’re riding fast, the culprit may be someone who looks like a roadie – reasonably fit and dressed in cycling kit. If you’re rolling along at a recovery pace, it will be someone who also looks like a roadie – a roadie for The Allman Brothers Band, wearing cut-off jean shorts, no shirt and riding a thrift-store 10-speed. When this latter situation happened to me, I turned around and said, “Hey! Get off my wheel!” The perpetrator grinned, his long hair trailing in the wind, and shouted, “Hey, dude, I’m drafting you! Woooo-hoooo!”

Now, drafting behind another rider without his knowledge is bad cycling etiquette. It’s dangerous, too. But the real reason I hate it so much is that I tend to talk to myself when I’m riding alone. I might be having an imaginary argument with my boss. (I am self-employed, making this even more embarrassing.) I might be working through ideas for my next column in this magazine. Or, I could just be singing a Stevie Wonder medley, complete with harmonica solos. Whatever the situation, it’s very distressing to realize suddenly that someone has been listening to me for the past 10 minutes.

Once I recover from my embarrassment, I find the best way to mete out justice is to speed up gradually until I ride the unwanted passenger off of my wheel. If I try this approach and I can’t drop the wheel suck, the other trick is to slow down until he is forced to pass me. Then I sit on his wheel until he tires out. When he does, I slingshot around and leave him to struggle alone in the wind. I never forget to say something sarcastic as I pass.

The other thing I learned this summer is that it’s important to vary your diet. It’s easy to get into a pattern of eating the same nutritious foods over and over again, and while the benefits of poutine and cake can’t be denied, there are advantages to trying something new. One of the best rides I had all summer was the morning after a street party in my neighbourhood. It will be hard to replicate my food consumption from that event, but I do plan to try before my next big competition. I should have no problem acquiring a dozen spring rolls, 18 samosas and three large glasses of single-malt Scotch. But it may be a stretch to get the old lady from No. 36 to whip up another Jello coleslaw surprise just for me.

I think the most important thing I learned this summer is that I, like nearly all amateur cyclists, tend to fall into the classic trap of training in the same way I always have, without applying any real structure to my program. We have power meters, heart-rate monitors and cycling computers that give us enormous amounts of data, but we don’t do anything with the information. We might look at a graph on the computer once in a while, but that’s usually where it ends. The result is that we maintain a fairly good level of fitness, but we never see any real improvement in our performance.

I didn’t race this season, but I decided to apply some science to my training nonetheless. Every week, I sent the data files from my power meter to my barber, who uses proprietary algorithms to identify trends and patterns. Combined with tests conducted in my homemade wind tunnel, we are developing a groundbreaking new design for aerodynamic sideburns. Look for them on a start line near you in 2013.