An Amusement & Diversion for The Genteel Cyclist. Daily.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Obree speaks: Plus the answers to yesterday's quiz!

We failed to give you the answer to yesterday's impossibly difficult quiz, so here it goes: The first formula is for calculating the oxygen-carrying capacity and performance of cyclists at altitude who are acclimatized. The second is for non-acclimatized athletes, otherwise known as "flatlanders" or "wussies."

What's that got to do with the One Hour record? Well, there are actually three separate one-hour records -- one for UCI-approved trackbikes on an approved track, one for UCI-approved track bikes at altitude, and one no-rules, any-design, salt-flat-in-Nevada for geeks in clamshells.

All of which just makes us pine for the language of a common man in lilting Scottish brogue...





But seriously, Grame. Did you really wear spandex when you were a messenger?

2 comments:

Snakebite said...

So what do the values from solving the equations mean? I got a negative number and two imaginaries from the cubic and a positive and a negative from the quadratic. But what do those numbers mean and/or what are the units associated? Inquiring minds want to know.

Pinchie said...

The Y value: It's a percentage of VO2 uptake.

And yammy was right, those X2 and R2s were supposed to be superscript exponents.

full description here:
http://www.midweekclub.ca/powerFAQ.htm#Q17