On this episode, Lennard Zinn shares his decades of experience and experimentation to help answer the question of whether shorter cranks are better.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Chris case in the Tour de France last summer, we all watched Tade Pacha dance away from the field day after day to win the race. What the media noticed was the shorter cranks who was running on his bike. Mental wisdom for a rider. Pagat height is to ride 170 2.5 millimeter cranks, but he was running 160 fives, and it’s not just pi Gotcha. Wout van Aert also runs 160 fives, and Jonas vinegared has been seen on 150 millimeter cranks. So the question many cyclists are now asking is whether shorter is better. Here to help us answer that question is the gear master himself, Leonard Zinn, author of Zinn in the art of bicycle maintenance, Leonard will talk with us about the decades of research he has conducted himself on crank length. He’ll explain why better aerodynamics may best explain the move to shorter cranks, despite the lack of evidence in lab studies, and how having shorter cranks allow riders to more easily maintain a higher cadence, which is a real benefit in bike races. Finally, we’ll talk about the impact short of cranks will have on frame geometry. Joining us in we’ll hear from Julie young, owner of Julie young coaching elite triathlon coach, Dr Jeff sankoff, host of the tridoc podcast, world land speed record holder John Howard and fast talks own. Andy Pruitt, so grab your measuring stick, and let’s make you fast
Chris Case 01:24
Leonard’s in. Welcome back to fast talk. It’s a pleasure. Thank you today. Oh, go ahead, please, Trevor, please butt in already.
Trevor Connor 01:37
For any of our listeners, I have been stealing the lead in from Chris, and so I said, you got this one. And then, yeah, you’re right, I butted in.
Chris Case 01:43
You did a little bit, but that’s okay. I will apologize. That’s good. You’ve got good energy. That’s good. Crank length is something it seems the entire cycling world is talking about, probably because today and Jonas and Pidcock shorter, people? Well, Pitcock, sure, but regardless, they’re running shorter crank lengths, and everybody’s talking about it, should I be on them? Should I not be on them? What’s the deal? It seems like no one’s ever thought about this before. But you, Leonard Zinn, have been thinking about this for 45 years, testing them, talking to people like Jim Martin, who has researched this in a lab setting to understand how crank length impacts, power, economy, aerodynamics, all of these things, and that’s what we want to explore today. And I know you’ve written about this extensively, so let’s have this conversation, if you wouldn’t mind. Yeah, give us a little bit of background on how much you’ve actually thought about this, the testing that you’ve done, and then we’ll dive into a conversation about what it all means.
John Howard 02:49
Well, I already, before I ever even started racing, thought about it. It just, you know, I have a degree in physics, and I guess when I got my first race bike. I suppose I was probably a freshman in college, but I
Chris Case 03:04
you were already 6768, at that point. 666, okay, what’s that? Yeah, Levi.
John Howard 03:10
Levi jeans, 31 waste, 40 length. My mom, they were hard to find. My mom had to order them from sheplers in Oklahoma City. Only place you get them. I mean, I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. You can’t not be interested in physics. I think growing up there and it just made sense to me, like, why would I not get the longest cranks that are available? So I did on my very first, first race by bike I had
Chris Case 03:41
which for how long, 180s 180s then, you know,
Lennard Zinn 03:45
I when I got my first really good racing bike, a mozzie that had 177 fives on it. And I, you know, ride with buddies on it. And they were good riders. And and then I, but it bugged me that they were only 170 7.5 and I got 180s and then the next day, I was slaughtering these guys on the same climbs that I’d been on. And I certainly attributed it to the crank length. And there could have been, there’s obviously plenty of other variables that it could have been, sure, but I had a very successful season that year, 1980 I won a lot of big races. I set the course record on Durango Silverton in the Iron Horse classic. And I I really thought the 180s were a big part of it. And then at the end of that season, I was named to national national team, the limbic development team, and and Eddie borisavich, Eddie b Did his fitting with me when I first came to limick Training Center, and he and he was very impressed that I had 180s on the bike. And he said, Oh, smart. Then says, he says you should actually ride 180s for everything, and 182 and a half for Time Trial, he’ll climb. And I said, Well, I don’t make any. Longer than 181 80, oh, sure, they make. They make, which they did not. So anyway, I stuck with the 180s for everything. Then, you know, the bikes weren’t made for it. And the bikes at the time, you know you’re wearing, you had toe clips, and you had, you had these quill Campagnolo quill pedals with toe clips on them. And they had very poor cornering clearance pedals did. And, you know, in criteriums, I clipped my pedals a lot. You know, I remember Davis Finney, just he and Bob Cook, and I broke away and lapped the field in the lamrisquarts criterium. And it has all these shallow bank corners that you really had to pedal through. And I’m like, clip, clip, clip. He’s like, God, Leonard, will you cut that out? Anyway? Then when I started working for fellow news, I really wanted to do something really thorough on it. And I thought, Well, you got to do it in a lab situation. And the ergometers I was familiar with were the monarch ergometers that they had at the limbic training center, but that those had, like, Ashtabula bottom brackets, you know, they had that non standard, you couldn’t just put a bicycle crank off a race bike on those, on those things. And plus, they had, you know, the the seat tube wasn’t round. I think, I think it was a square, like a square seat post go up so you could raise them. Yeah, exactly. And it was like, vertical, you know, it was set way behind the bottom bracket. It went up vertical. So depending on how high you went, then you’d be either disproportionately thrown back or for shorter people, or way further forward than normally would be for a tall person. And it was just all screwed up. And so, so I decided I’m just make my own ergometer i, and i that takes all the monarch flywheel and the resistance strap and all that stuff, and so, so I made one then that had took a normal threaded bottom bracket and had a 73 degree angle Seat, sure tube that and had a super, super long seat post so that you could go up and down, but you’d be going up along on the correct angle for a bike. And then I made adjustable stem that would go way the heck out and back and way up and down, so that then you could actually test because otherwise, if you, if you just, like, obviously, if you, if you’re gonna test cranks like you were testing out at the extremes, yeah, so, so we tested 17 crank lengths from 100 millimeter to 220 millimeter. And they were weird numbers because they were divided evenly seven that range divided by 17. So there’s, I think there was a 134 and a half, and there was a 208, and a half, or something like that. Anyway, bunch of stuff like that. And, and this guy, Boone, made the cranks for us, and, and, and the but, you know, if you just took and stuck them on somebody’s bike, it you couldn’t possibly run through that whole range without completely screwing up the person’s fitting on the bike shows because, say, the person’s riding 170 and then you, you stick 100 millimeter on there. So their, their seat heights has to go up 70 millimeters higher, but their their handlebar can’t go up 70 millimeters higher. And, yep, you know, and, and, and then similarly, you know, you put a 220 on there, they’re not going to even be able to pedal straight without their pedals hitting the ground, much less turn. And then again, their saddles way out down, and their handle bar can’t come down that far. And so, so you had to have this thing very widely adjustable. And then, and then we had all these riders come in just for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, very small, super talented woman rider. And then sort of couple of mid range height people, and then me on the extreme end. And then we did a, we just did an ergometer step test like they did limit Training Center, where you just pick a cadence that you’re going to stick to, and then you do, you do a certain amount of time at a given power. And so then, and then, if you could get through that like it was five minutes, I think five minutes, you get through that five minutes, then you up the power so the resistance on the belt went up, so that you were now going to go 5050, watts higher, and and, but you had to maintain the same cadence. But we made the cadence proportional the crank length. In other words, we said, Okay, if standard is going to be, I don’t remember what we said, 90 RPM at 170 and then, then, you know, the 100 millimeter became, I don’t know, 160 RPM or something, and that 220 became like 60 RPM, right? And you just have to hold that cadence. And then, and then we would just see the same way. Is the step test at the OTC. You just see what power level you could get to, and then the one that you couldn’t get through the whole five minutes. That’s when the test ended. You couldn’t maintain the cadence for that. And what’d you find? Well, what was interesting was that all of the riders, no matter what height they were, went the longest on the 220s which totally surprised the crap out of me. This five foot two Danelle balangi, really? Oh, she Yeah. And then that was the biggest thing. And we, we, you know, this is pretty early. We didn’t have, like, the kind of thing you have now, where you could actually record their heart rate and look at a graph afterward of every but I came away from that like, geez, what do I do with this information? Because what I wanted was like, this crank length is going to be the right one for this size. And so then I just started riding them all, you know. And I go on group rides with all these different crank lengths, 100
Chris Case 10:57
mil crank on a six, six. Human Being. How did that go? Yeah, and I,
John Howard 11:02
what was amazing was a that I could, that I could adapt that position, because the seat went up so high, you know, 80 millimeters higher than I had with my 180s and so then I had eight centimeters more dropped to the handlebars. But it was no problem, because my knees weren’t coming up. In fact, my knees were coming up 160 millimeters less than they would have been twice the twice the crank length difference. That was no problem aerodynamically, you know, then I was really good and and that I just naturally picked this crazy high cadence. And I didn’t have a cadence monitor, but I could just counting them. It was like, you know, I’d be pedaling easily at 160 to 200 rpm, and, and I just could keep up fine in these group rides. And I could certainly keep up fine on all the other crank lengths as well. And, and that I hadn’t expected at all. I thought I’d get, you know, I’d get dropped on these really short cranks and then on, you know, and it just didn’t happen that way. So I was much more than when Jim Martin started to do, doing his tests, you know, that was his. This is probably 1212, years before Jim Martin’s 2001 test that. And he’s at out in Utah, yeah, University of Utah, yeah, yeah, professor there. But his, his tests, you know, ultimately showed that over similar crank length range, 120 millimeter to 220 that in a lab situation that was much more controlled than ours was with with, I don’t know what his how his ergometer was set up, but, but in terms of being able to monitor all sorts of characteristics of the riders and everything that was going to be a much more lab appropriate test and and that he found that there was only a 3.9% difference in the maximum power any of the riders put out with with a crank versus the lowest of any crank, and it varied which one it was, the one that They put out the most, and which one is one that they put out the least, but, but in any case, there wasn’t much variation. So that’s
Trevor Connor 13:08
certainly what I’ve seen in the research. I mean, there hasn’t been a ton of studies, but the studies that I have seen said within a range, so not including the extremes, like a 220 or 100 but in that kind of 140 to 180 length range, really, they’re showing just not that much difference.
John Howard 13:27
Yeah, yeah, exactly so far. And I’m assuming that in all these cases, they allow the rider to self select the cadence. Because if you can’t do that, then it doesn’t make any sense. Like if you’re trying to big gear 140 millimeter crank, you know that’s not gonna gotta work. You know, if you but if you just naturally let your body pick what it’s what’s gonna pick for cadence, then, then, yeah, you’re always gonna find that. I think, before
Trevor Connor 13:55
we go much deeper, let’s hear John Howard explain why crank length is individual and why there may not be one optimal crank length.
John Howard 14:04
Leonard and I are good friends. I admire everything he’s done in cycling and the bikes he’s built, and we go back a long way, just like Andy. What I found is that it’s a tough call, and I think you gotta, you gotta do some testing, personal testing, to see if those short cranks work for you or you’re better off on the longer ones. I run long cranks, and I have never had any issues with my any long term issues with my knees, so I’m not sure what the answer to that is, try them. Try the shorter ones, see if they work. Do some testing. Actually do some testing. That’s the only way you’re going to know for sure. What I found is that the shorter cranks did not work. I’m predominantly slow twitch, meaning slow muscle fibers, lots of white fibers, I believe no. Other way around red fibers. What that means for me is that when I put shorter cranks on my bike, my heart rate starts climbing. So I get into a comfort zone with those long cranks where I’m not turning that many RPMs, but I think that means a lower more more power and slightly lower heart rate. So that’s what I found, personally. That’s what I found. But I think it’s important to know, Are you fast twitch? Slow twitch? What are you? Have you tested them thoroughly? That’s another point. If you haven’t tested them, then you’re up sheep to the slaughter. You’re going by what everybody so let’s go short. Let’s go short. So I would say that do your own research and figure it out.
Chris Case 15:52
This might be a good place to sort of step back and talk a little bit about physics, the formula power equals torque times cadence. Do you want to explain that and how that relates to what we’ve been talking about? Yeah, exactly.
John Howard 16:05
So. So that’s the reason that that formula is really the reason that kind of cycling is a sport that almost any body type works. You know, it’s not like gymnastics, where a certain body type, you know, it’s going to be a small person versus basketball or big person, you know, that kind of thing. It’s like all these body types are successful at it, and it’s because so torque is the rotational equivalent of force. And you can think of it like a teeter totter that you know, the amount of force that you exert on the teeter totter is your weight, your mass times gravity out on the end of the teeter totter, and you can lift a much bigger person if you’re further from the fulcrum of the teeter totter. You You know they the teeter totter allows you to move it, move the fulcrum and and if, if there’s somebody who’s just keeps throwing you up in the air, then you move the fulcrum closer to them and further away from you. Then you then sit on you’re exerting the same force as you would have been, except now you’ve got a longer, longer lever arm, and that is a bigger torque than that you’re applying. And torque is then the force times the radius. So in this case, the distance from your seat to the fulcrum of the teeter totter in the in the equivalent thing on a bike, it’s the length of the crank. So then that’s what allows you, if you think of then. So with a bicycle, yes, the fundamental formula for power is torque times frequency, well, and frequency in cycling is cadence. It’s the number of times per second that, or per minute, or per unit time that your cranks go around. And then the torque is the force that you’re applying on the pedal times the crank length. And so that means a number of things that if you’re somebody who can put out more for well, so if you’re trying to go as fast as somebody who’s able to put out more force, and you say, in this case, you got the same crank length on both you, this person can put out more force, but he pedals at a lower cadence. Then if you put out your lower amount of force, but you can pedal at that same proportional higher cadence, then you’re going to put out the same amount of power and and similarly, then if you are putting out less force, and you get a longer crank, and you pedal that at the same cadence as this other person, again, you’re going to have the same amount of power. So it’s a incredibly equalizing thing, and the gearing of the bike is what allows you to take advantage of all these things. If we were all riding one speeds, then you couldn’t take as much advantage of it. This
Chris Case 18:57
might not be the right way to ask this question, but I think it might lead into some of the other categories of why crank length might be a consideration for people. Why are these pros right now changing and going to considerably shorter crank lengths? Well,
John Howard 19:17
I do have a theory, and not being in their heads, or being able to talk with their physiologists, who probably keep some of it secret. I think it’s because it allows them to take better advantage of aerodynamics that I assume that they’re testing that they’ve done with their top rider, who, you know, say, today, Bucha or, Jonas finger guard that their testing shows that they don’t lose much power, if any, by going to a shorter crank. They just their cadence goes up, but their their power stays the same, or close to it, even if it drops some The fact is that if. You then have your knee coming up so much less high that then you can fold your hip down more and be still comfortable. And so you can have your back more horizontal, you can be much more aerodynamic, and that’s going to make way more difference than a small percentage increase. Or say that, say there, say there was a small decrease in power, but, but you have a, first of all, you could have a percentage, wise, probably much bigger decrease in aerodynamic drag, but then you take into account that aerodynamic drag, unlike power and cadence and all that, which is independent of the speed you’re riding, the aerodynamic drag goes up as the square, maybe as the cube, in some cases, of your velocity. So the faster you ride. If you’re already a pro that’s riding very fast, to go 1% faster takes much more than 1% more power, because you’re overcoming this incredibly much, much greater wind resistance. Whereas if you were both say you’re riding at five miles an hour and you want to go 1% faster, you can probably just put out 1% more power, and that’ll do it, right? But once you’re going 30 or 35 miles an hour, to go 1% faster is probably going to take 10% or maybe more,
Speaker 1 21:21
it’s speed cubed. So everybody calls it speed cube. Is that? That’s technically wrong? Well, I know for rockets and fast cars, it is speed cubed. Well, so no, it’s relative speed squared times absolute speed. So it’s relative to the wind, which is important. So why
John Howard 21:40
does absolute speed ever come in then that
Trevor Connor 21:43
just so it’s got it’s been a long time since I did this formula, and I will tell you, I actually had a long argument with my biomechanics professor in class when we got to this and I was making the point that it’s not speed cubed, it’s actually relative speed squared times absolute speed. And I won the argument, but I can’t remember. It’s very long.
John Howard 22:04
It doesn’t make any sense that you you even care how fast the ground is going past. It actually only matters how fast the air is going past, yeah, but it
Trevor Connor 22:15
actually is a factor. Okay, so relative speed is you have to factor in, essentially wind, so you might be moving at, say, 20 miles an hour, but if you have a 10 mile an hour headwind, your relative speed is actually 30 miles an hour, where your absolute speed is still 20 miles an hour. So it is important, yeah? Sorry, big tan. Anyway, we’re gonna have a few of these biochanical tangents on this episode. Yeah?
John Howard 22:41
So in any case, if you think of somebody like today, Bucha, he’s doing these incredible, long solo efforts and and obviously they’re all now like wearing one piece. They’re optimizing, they’re optimizing everything. Their their bikes are very so we so we
Speaker 2 23:01
think, yeah, in 20 more years, we’ll be like, what were they thinking in 2025
John Howard 23:04
yeah, there’s no exposed wires on their bikes. There’s none of you know, wheels are all deep section by now, they figured out that actually, you know, it doesn’t actually even pay to use a shallow section wheel that’s lighter for climbing because so much of the rest of the aerodynamics, and the rest of the time plays so much bigger role that you’re still better with Aero wheel and all that stuff. So they’ve optimized everything and and now, if he can just get much lower and more aerodynamic and comfortable and comfortable, yeah, and, and then, you know, you also think of the guys doing lead outs, similar thing where you know the Sprinter, I would say that that the Sprinter that does the final 200 meters, since he’s out of the saddle, it’s probably, I wouldn’t doubt it, if it that person, like a BMX rider, might actually be better off in a lot with a long crank for that one part, but definitely the guy who’s doing the lead out, he’s just got to pull at this incredible rate of speed to not let anybody, any of the other teams, pass him for a long period of time. And he can’t be squirming around to try and find a comfortable position. He’s got to stay in this super air position locked in. Yeah, and so that’s going to be easier to do. The shorter the crank is, he can just get way low and and pedal it hard. And some of those guys are really big and really tall, and they have an amazing amount of drop from their saddle to their bar, and part of that is because the crank is really disproportionately short for them. And I’ve
Speaker 2 24:36
heard, what did I hear the other day? Vin ago, was running out of TT. He was running 150s I want to say so that is you double that. Let’s assume that, quote, unquote, his normal crank length was 172, five. You double that, and his knees are coming up. That much less. What is that? 45 millimeters less that his knees are coming up?
Trevor Connor 24:57
This is a really important thing. Understand if you’re just hearing this crank Clank conversation for the first time, which is, the longer the crank, the further you have to reach down through the bottom of your stroke, and the higher your knees are going to come up at the top end of the stroke. And it’s kind of You and I both remember this. The belief was time trials, you want to be on a longer crank, but if you think about on a time trial bike. That’s when you want to be bent over aerodynamic. And if you got your knees coming up higher, you’re going to this extreme range of motion. And they’ve shown it actually affects your ability to breathe. And
John Howard 25:31
at the bottom, I just want to clarify. At the bottom, you’re not any more extension. You generally make sure seat height to the bottom be the same, no out of the crank length, right?
Speaker 2 25:41
If we went any farther than bike manufacturers would actually have to start creating different frames with different geometries. But that was the thing, bottom bracket, etc. Yeah.
John Howard 25:52
This bag like vineyard guard, yeah. So he’s saved 17 and a half millimeters on the bottom part of the stroke, and 17 and a half millimeters the top 35 millimeters difference over the range. Oh, is that right? No, I thought 22 and a half. 2022 now 22 I’m sorry, yeah, 35 so 45 millimeters. But he’s presumably using the same bike that he was before, right? Which means that he’s now raised his saddle half of that the 22 and a half millimeters, yeah, and so he is. His butt is 22 and a half millimeters higher up in the wind. And he could optimize this more if he had a bike with 22 and a half millimeter lower bottom bracket, right? And then he’d get the same pedaling clearance and everything, but he’d be 22 and a half millimeters further down and out of the wind, which my guess is that the the bike that he rode in the in the tour of the Algarve was his old bike. But if they determine, you know, he won this. He won not only won the overall, but he also won the time trial on these 150s that my guess is they’re feeling pretty good about these 150s and that they’re probably working on a bike with a lower bottom bracket for the tour to get even more out of I’m shaking
Speaker 2 27:07
my head, because I don’t want this to happen to the bike industry. It’s like, oh no. We don’t want new manufacturers to have to like, man, anyways, that’s a that’s a whole other story. But this. So I’m
Trevor Connor 27:21
going to interrupt quickly, because this is a good place to throw on aside. We did actually talk with Jess sankoff, who everybody knows as the tri doc, and he talked about this with triathletes who are figuring this out, that you can get that more aerodynamic position when your knees are not coming up as high with the shorter cranks. So they’re finding the value in that in triathlon. So let’s hear from him quickly.
Jeff Sankoff 27:42
I think that crank length is important. I don’t have a great handle on how important, but I definitely know that when it comes to being aero on a bike, crank length can really play a role. I know, like for myself, I used to ride with 170 2.5 and I now ride on 155 and having that much shorter crank length has allowed me to raise my seat and get my handlebars lower and have a much more arrow position. So the ability to change the crank length, and also the shorter crank length, also allows for less stress on your hamstrings when you’re dealing with a more forward seat position. So there’s a lot of interplay between crank length and how your cycling form will then translate to your ability to run. And I think at triathlon, there is a lot of individuality to how crank lengths can play out. Is it the most vital and most important thing? Probably not, but definitely, when you’re getting fitted, I think it’s something you should definitely consider, and definitely should play into your aerodynamic thinking. Is
Speaker 2 28:50
this something that’s more widely adopted in triathlon these days because of aerodynamic factors? Yeah, definitely,
Trevor Connor 28:57
100% I imagine part of the factor here is, on triathlon bikes, you are bent way over, you have a much tighter hip angle, so if you’re on a longer crank, it’s going to bring your knees up, and you start running into issues of bringing your knees into your chest, into your gut, and affects your breathing Correct. Yep.
Lennard Zinn 29:15
And with a shorter crank, because your foot isn’t going quite so far down, you could raise that seat which allows you to lean forward more comfortably, and it just gets your back flatter. It just makes a big difference.
Trevor Connor 29:30
So what I find really interesting about this conversation, and I definitely read some of the studies. There isn’t that much research on this, is when you get into a lab, they tend to look at the same thing, Time Trial performance, let’s hook you up to a metabolic cart and see if you’re consuming more oxygen or less oxygens for the same power. There’s a lot of other things that you can measure, but that’s where researchers tend to go, and when you look at it from that perspective. So if you’re looking at oxygen consumption for a given power, if. That goes up or down, you’re changing your efficiency. And what they’ve certainly shown in the studies is no real difference in efficiency. You’re still consuming about the same amount of oxygen for the same power at all these different crank lengths. So certainly in the lab, they’re not finding that much exciting, though they are finding biomechanical differences, for sure. But what I want to hear from you, because I think this is a case where the research hasn’t caught up. What are the other possible explanations for the benefits of shorter cranks? They just haven’t researched yet. So
John Howard 30:31
one is that there’s this idea that at the point of the crank circle, which is when the crank is horizontally, forward, three o’clock position that you can put apply more force to the crank if you’re on a shorter crank than if you’re on a taller one, and that’s because your knee bend is lower. And just like if you’re doing squats with heavy weights, with less knee knee bend, you can lift more weight if you go into a deep squat, you’re gonna have to drop the weight a bunch. But if you just go to like a 90 degree or less angle, you can just keep upping the weight so you can at the point of the stroke where it’s most optimal, you can apply more force with every crank length. There will be a point where the knee bend is this lower angle where you can push harder, but on a longer crank that’s going to happen further down in the stroke, where it’s takes less advantage of the longer crank. So that’s certainly one that makes a lot of sense. There’s another one that not really sure how this necessarily pans out. There was the, you know, Lance Armstrong argument, which was where he was using 175 or 170 2.5 I can’t remember now, but, but he wasn’t changing crank length. He was just upping cadence. And he, you know, do these long before he won his first Tour de France, spent an entire off season in Boone, North Carolina, with Chris Carmichael, working on upping his cadence. And the idea was his endurance would improve, because if he’s putting out the same power, but at a higher cadence, then because the formula that we just talked about, torque times cadence equals power. If he hasn’t changed the crank length, and He’s maintaining the same power and he’s increased the cadence, that means he gets to decrease the force, so the peak force on each pedal stroke is lower to maintain the same power. So that means that if your peak force is lower than you produce less blood lactate, and your muscles fatigue less fast. So in this case, now we’re talking about shortening the crank. The cadence goes up, but we’re also talking about increasing the force that you can put in because of the lower knee bend. So not sure that it necessarily affects this
Speaker 2 32:52
doesn’t that kind of contradict what you were talking about before we started recording Trevor about the most economical cadence is typically down like 7080, any
Trevor Connor 33:05
physiologist listening to this, please feel free to write us afterwards and go Trevor, you moron. Yes, you know me, I’m usually more comfortable when I come in with a bunch of research and can just sit there and read from studies. I’m discussing a lot of this off the cuff, so I hope I have this right, but I think the idea when he’s saying less lactate production, what they’re suggesting is, when he’s at that higher cadence, he’s recruiting fewer muscle fibers. Now something really important for people to understand. You always hear the slow twitch, fast twitch muscle fibers. Those names were given because in the original studies of muscle fibers. They just found that fast twitch muscle fibers contracted faster. But it’s caused everybody to think, Oh, if my legs are moving slowly, I’m recruiting slow twitch muscle fibers, and if they’re moving fast, I’m recruiting fast twitch muscle fibers. So then you’re logically think, oh, at a higher cadence, I have to recruit more fast twitch muscle fibers. Truth of the matter is, unless you’re a track sprinter doing 190 rpm. All those cadences are slow enough that you can handle it with slow twitch muscle fibers. So what determines whether you recruit fast twitch muscle fibers versus slow twitch muscle fibers is the amount of torque. The more torque you put out, the more fibers you need to recruit. And initially at low torques, you’re just going to recruit slow twitch muscle fibers. As the torque goes up and you need to recruit more muscle fibers, you’re going to bring in the fast twitch muscle fibers. Fast twitch muscle fibers produce lactate. Slow twitch muscle fibers consume lactate. So that’s why they’re saying it keeps the lactate down. Because I think their theory is at those higher cadences, you’re recruiting less muscle fiber, so you’re going to be more slow twitch muscle fiber. The one issue with the higher cadence there’s this factor that any researcher knows about, which is, if you took the chain completely off the bikes, you’re putting out no power into the bike. You’re still going to use energy because muscles are moving. Vein. You’ve got joints where the bones are rubbing on bones that’s going to generate heat so you are just in the actual motion, pedal stroke. Motion takes energy
Speaker 3 35:09
and just breathing and digesting and all your things. And the
Trevor Connor 35:14
issue is at a higher cadence, you got more of that movement on friction. Yeah, the friction, everything else, you are consuming more energy at a higher cadence than a lower cadence, even if you had the chain off the bike and the power was not a factor at all. So that has to be factored in, and it actually is a significant amount of energy. So there is a cost of higher energy, and they’ve shown cost of higher for higher cadence, yeah, yeah. So the most efficient cadence is actually extraordinarily low. It’s like around 4050, RPM. Cyclists make the sacrifice to do a higher cadence, because if you’re sitting in a field trudging away at 40 rpm and somebody attacks, they’re going to be half a mile up the road before you get up to speed, because you can’t respond to that. And they have shown in pros, that most efficient cadence, and again, it might be economy, but I’m just gonna use efficiency. That most efficient cadence goes up, but they still ride at a higher cadence than what is optimally efficient. I think in pros it’s closer to like 80 RPM, but they still race at 90 to 100 rpm, willing to sacrifice a little bit of the you know, it’s going to cost me a little more energy, but I can be more responsive in the race. And I think that was what Armstrong’s team was looking at, of, yeah, we’re going to consume more energy over the course of the race. Got to make sure you’re fueling correctly, but we’re producing less lactate. We’re not recruiting those fast swish muscle fibers. You can be more responsive. So the you look at the cost benefit and the benefits outweigh that’s the long explanation. Are my guess at what they were thinking and
John Howard 36:49
touching on some of what you just said too. You know, Jan Ulrich was his major competition at the time, and so when Armstrong was winning at this higher cadence, then his team said, Okay, well, we got to do that too. And so he spent an entire off season down in South Africa working on doing that on higher cadence. But, you know, he was a much bigger guy with longer legs, longer, bigger, heavier legs, and it was just super inefficient for him. And they just, they scrapped it because it he was slower. He didn’t have the endurance if he did that. So he just
Trevor Connor 37:22
liked to grind it out. It was funny, like, he’d watch it on the tour, and Armstrong would initially get that attack on him, get like two minutes on him, but then he would actually kind of match Armstrong the rest of way of the climb. He’d kind of hold pace with him, but they show Armstrong. Armstrong’s spinning this high cadence and standing up, and he’d go, oh, he looks so fast. And then they Joe Ulrich seated doing like 60 rpm, and they go, he’s getting crushed. They’re actually going the same pace, just very different gearing
Speaker 2 37:48
to shift gears a little bit. But stay on this theme of benefits. Are there other benefits in terms of riding style that a shorter or longer crank might have to do with people that stand more when they climb, or they’re more comfortable with it. This goes to sort of the different styles that Armstrong and Ulrich had in their day, and people naturally gravitate towards out in the world. Are there any considerations there? One
John Howard 38:16
way to think about is to look at BMX. So in BMX, they’re sprinting the whole time, and they’re sprinting out of the saddle the entire time. They never sit on the seat until after they’ve crossed the finish line. And it’s a 42nd race, and it’s won in the first two seconds. And so the very first couple of pedal strokes make a huge difference. And the argument that we made earlier about being able to optimize your knee angle to be able to push harder. Well, if you’re standing, you can lift your body higher, and you can get the lower knee angle by doing that by standing higher and and so that argument goes out the window, but then you’re just left with this bigger, longer lever that you can get a bigger jump right out of the gate because you’re standing on a longer lever, and you get more torque with the same force. And so climbing, yeah, the same things apply climbing. The problem is that with climbing, it’s also less efficient over a long climb to be lifting your entire body up and down and all that than just sitting. So, you know, Richard veronk, for instance, would always do these long climbs standing the whole time, and he went pretty fast.
Speaker 2 39:28
But there’s a lot of other stuff going on. There’s a
John Howard 39:31
lot of other stuff going on there and so, so another thing that, if we also think about this same lactate production thing where we say, okay, you know, if you’re doing a higher cadence, then you can minimize the recruitment of the fast twitch fibers, and you can produce less lactate. Well, the same thing goes, if you increase crank length and you maintain the same cadence, then you can go to the same do the same power output. Right, but with lower force, because you’ve got more leverage. And so that’s doing the same thing as what we talked about with the higher cadence, where your peak forces are less so you can you’re not recruiting as many muscle fibers. You produce less lactate. So that’s that’s another argument, then that goes in the favor of the of the longer crank. The BMX example is also a good one in the sense that, yes, they’re going fast, so aerodynamics are important. But on the other hand, drafting just doesn’t work in BMX, because they’re flailing around, throwing their bike back and forth. They’re jumping over these jumps. If you try and stay right on somebody’s wheel, you’re going to end up crashing, because you have no prediction of which angle they’re going to end up, how they’re going to land, and where you’re going to land, relative to them and and then them throwing their bike back and forth. It’s not like on the track, where these seated sprinters are, you know, spinning like crazy, and they can go shoot off each other’s slipstream. Did
Speaker 2 40:56
you not experiment with crank lengths within cyclocross races, and draw any conclusions from that? Do you think that’s relevant to this conversation? Well,
John Howard 41:05
you know, the problem is, it’s what we kind of call a straw man test, where there’s one person Yeah. Was me, yes, and in for me, I was racing on 205 cranks in cyclocross. And in cyclocross, the whole shot is super important. It makes no difference in road racing, who gets off the line first and and even in track racing, same thing,
Speaker 2 41:31
but it’s a lot of acceleration in cyclocross out of corner, yeah, corner
John Howard 41:35
after corner after corner, you’re standing, getting up out of the saddle, sprinting. You know, a typical course seven minute loop, you might have 1010, almost 180 degree turns on it, and then you do that seven times, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s a ton of standing accelerations where you’re going to be benefiting with a longer crank and as long as your bike. You know, in my case, I’m a frame builder, so I made my bike, have, you know, the 3545 millimeter higher bottom bracket relative to these people having 170 cranks, and so I had no clearance problems and aerodynamics, you know, I didn’t have worry about trying to be really low, because being high, little higher position on cyclocross is beneficial when you’re handling in mud or sand or whatever, and you’re not going that fast that that it makes that much difference the aerodynamics compared to handling, bike handling and sprinting out of corners and sprinting from the start are way more important than than those things. So yeah, I think cyclocross is something that would really there is significant benefit, as long as the bike is designed for the longer crank, which is a huge caveat, yes, right? And there’s another thing, you know, the UCI has been talking Well, there’s riders pushing, some riders like Valt van art pushing for a gear restriction in pro riding that like what used to be with junior racing. And the idea is top end, top end gear restriction, yeah, where we have all these horrendous crashes and we want to be safer. So if the gear, the top end gear is lower, then valts argument is that on the descent where what used to be a case where people wouldn’t try and pass each other because they were spun out. They just, they’d only be coasting so they couldn’t, they couldn’t pass each other anyway. They wouldn’t try and make these crazy passes in too tight of conditions with sharp corners. But now, if they’ve got, you know, a nine or 10, two, three or cog and a 54 on the front, they can still turn that at descending speeds of 50 miles an hour or higher, and and then they could try and pass people and create much more dangerous situations. The thing that’s interesting though, about that is supposedly about fan artists now switched, even though he’s a very big guy, switched to 165 cranks himself. That plays entirely into the hands of the person on the shorter cranks, because they can spin it faster. So if you’re a gear restriction, if everybody has the same gear restriction, but you have a much shorter crank, and you naturally are spinning at a much higher cadence, you can go faster when you’re descending. You can pedal it at a faster speed than the guys with the longer cranks are. And so the gear restriction is also going to play out in the field sprints. And then it’s also going to be beneficial for all the lead out men to have shorter and shorter cranks, because then they can, they can still go just as fast as they’re going now, but in a lower gear, because their crank length is shorter and they can spin it faster, but they’re going to have to have lower bottom rackets, and the frame manufacturers will start doing it, and it’s going to mess everything up. Oh, man, and all the number of skews the bikes. Top number of number of crank lengths available, number of different variations of frames.
Speaker 2 45:05
A serious question, though, do you think that’s the direction things are headed? Is this more than a few pros doing something? Is this going to change the bike industry in that way you think? Well, given that people’s can they make money off it is the better question. Well,
John Howard 45:21
I don’t know if they can, because of the fact that then the production costs go so up and yeah, all that. And particularly, then for the for the bike shops that have to stock these things. But if you think about the equipment that road riders use, it’s always 100% aspirational. Same with mountain bikers too. I mean, when cross country riders started winning mountain bike races on 29 inch wheels, that was the wheel size, everybody had to have a 29 ER, and then, oh, well, now 27.5 is cool. Okay, everybody’s gotta have 27.5 you know. And, and the same arguments, I think, can go with wheel size, about body size and smaller, just like crank length, shorter relative to whom, relative to what, just same thing, smaller relative to whom. You know that that it makes sense to to scale up and down wheel size and gearing and everything based on rider size, just like crank length. But people buy what the pros are riding, and it’s it’s why right now, you know, try as SRAM might. People aren’t using one buys on their road bikes, because pros aren’t using one buys on the road bike. When they start doing that, then one buys will start selling on road bikes, but now they just sell on cross bikes and mountain bikes, because it’s aspirational. That’s what people are winning races in those events, on and in triathlon is a good example. We just talked about that there was a time when triathlon, okay, 26 inch wheels. That’s the size. And everybody got 26 inch wheels. And it was, everybody believed in them. Then people started winning on 700 sea wheels. And now, or you never, you never hear about it at all. There was whole, whole companies. Quintana Roo is one that started completely based on the 26 inch wheel size. And so whether it actually makes a difference or not, is, is not really the point. It’s it’s what who’s using it, and how much following they have. And then the manufacturers and the bike shops who stock the stuff will have to follow, if that’s where the dollars go.
Trevor Connor 47:34
The one thing I would say a little bit differently there is not the manufacturers have to follow. I think the manufacturers love these sorts of things. You know, carbon fiber frames last pretty long time now, so people are only going to upgrade their bike if they damage it, or they discover a new event, like gravel
John Howard 47:52
that’s different than Road, yeah, so,
Speaker 2 47:56
or they have to buy a new frame because the crank length, yeah. And I think
Trevor Connor 48:00
the bike manufacturers are looking at and going, I hope this becomes a real trend, because then everybody’s going to need a new bike with a different frame geometries to fit the smaller cranks, and everybody’s going to have to upgrade their bike. They love these things, yeah, good point. I think this is also a really good point. As you were discussing this and the fact that the frame has to be different, we asked Andy Pruitt about this, and his immediate response was, you have to factor in the bike fit. You can’t just put the shorter cranks on. And so I think this is a good place. Let’s hear from Andy now.
Dr. Andy Pruitt 48:34
So I would say that Dr Jim Martin, University of Utah, has done extensive work on crank length and performance, and he sees no connection between crank length and performance changes even having different length crank arms on each side, it didn’t take long before people were adapted to the differences. So and my philosophy is that crank length is a bike fit tool used as necessary. Whether you need to go longer or whether you need to go shorter, has to do with hip function, knee function, low back function. So I think crank arm length is a fitting tool not to be looked at as a performance tool. So
Trevor Connor 49:15
I kind of promised myself I wasn’t going to bring this up, but I do think we need to bring this up, and this is where I’m going to get myself in trouble, because before we start we started recording, Leonard said, Hey, Trevor, I want to hear your opinion on this. And he asked me this question, and then I went, Wow, I’ve never thought about that. So you are going to be hearing a lot of stuff off the cuff with this, but you did bring up the fact that on shorter cranks, you can do a higher cadence, and I think it’s important we address why that is, and hopefully we can give a good visual. But think about a spinning wheel. If you have a wheel spinning at a certain cadence, the further you are away from the hub, the faster the wheel is spinning. The point is going the point is going on the wheel. Yes. So if you have shorter cranks, so let’s say you have somebody on 180 cranks and somebody on 140 cranks, they’re both pedaling at 100 rpm, so same cadence. The person on the 140 cranks, their foot is moving at a slower
Speaker 2 50:17
speed. Doesn’t have to travel as far, right? So it is a
Trevor Connor 50:21
slower speed. So that means that you can comfortably pedal a higher cadence, because what our legs notice is not really the cadence, but the speed at which our foot has to move. Right? I get that. I get that. Okay, absolutely.
John Howard 50:34
And your body naturally does it. I mean, anybody can sort of think of it at the limits. You know, if somebody hands you a 500 millimeter crank, you know, you can’t turn that at 90 RPM, it’s obvious, you know, you will be able to get it around, and it’ll take a while to get it around. And then somebody gives you a 50 millimeter crank, you’re gonna be like, Oh, this is a crazy little toy, and you’ll just spin
Speaker 2 50:59
it around every time you jump on your child’s bike and they’ve got really short cranks, you’re just like, I feel like a clown in a circus right now, because it’s just natural.
Trevor Connor 51:08
So this goes back to the we were talking before, about the when we’re talking like a 172 crank of 170 2.5 that pros tend to ride at a cadence way above what’s most efficient, but what’s most efficient is related to how fast your feet are moving, less actually less about the cadence. So one of the theories we had about advantages of the shorter cranks is pros still want to ride at a high cadence so they can respond. But if you have a shorter crank that should theoretically bring the optimal cadence much closer to what you’re going to ride at in a race, so you might get the benefits of both a higher cadence and actually being a little closer to what’s most efficient. That’s working theory that we discussed for like 25 minutes before we went on air.
Speaker 2 51:56
Yes, but please, please write theory. Please write in and tell Trevor. He’s tell me I’m
Trevor Connor 52:02
a moron. Yes, let’s, let’s hear it. It was 20 minutes of thinking out loud, so I won’t cry too much.
Speaker 2 52:07
So let’s actually get to the big question here. Maybe what the action item for the listener out there, who should be considering, if anyone changing their crank length. And this goes for Well, are there people right now that are running 172 fives and all they do are time trials? Yeah, you might want to drop that. Or somebody like yourself. You’re six six and you’re still on 170 I don’t you know, like, what does a really big bike come stock from the manufacturer, is that really not appropriate length for them? Like, who should be making changes to their crank length? And how should they be doing that? I
John Howard 52:48
think it has to do with your leg length, which is usually related to your height. Sure, not always, yep, you know. And there’s a bunch of bandied about theories about 10% of your height, or 20% of your leg length, or 40% of your tibia length, your tip, because you’re not your femur length, because it used to be, people in worry about your femur length. Longer femur can use a longer crank. Well, yeah, but also that means you got a shorter tibia. If You Have you got the same length legs, but but more of it’s in your femur, then your knees aren’t going to come up as high. So if it’s 40% of tibia length, and that’s another way of looking at it. But in any case, I think it makes sense to look as a proportion of your size, not as they’re winning races on these things. I need that length just like they’re running races on 29 inch wheels, and I’m a five foot tall woman, I need 29 inch wheels. That doesn’t make sense. And so one of the things that I’ve seen in my business, people understand about leverage. They know that it’s a lot harder to pull a nail out of a board with a claw hammer than it is with a crowbar. And my business has for a lot of its life. It’s now 43, years in existence. A lot of that time, most of my customers were really tall, six, four taller. To those people, it just makes sense, you know, they’ve everything’s been too small for them their whole life, and that it makes sense to have a longer crank, and then the idea that they have more leverage, they think they’re going to go faster and and in my own experience, on just straight climbing or or like we’ve talked about in cyclocross, yeah, absolutely. I think you go faster. But then when you consider all the range of cycling up and down, and aerodynamics and getting out of the wind and everything, probably not really true. But on the small end, I’m constantly selling bikes to people five feet tall or shorter, and they. Tend to be very scared to go to a shorter crank. Now, that’s maybe changing now, with Vinca guard winning things on 150s but certainly up until maybe now, when I propose 150 crank or 140 crank to five foot two person, maybe like, Oh my God, but I won’t be able to keep up with my friends, because they think about, they got this shorter lever, and I explained to them, well, actually, you know, and because, fortunately, because now they’re making these wide gear ranges, yeah, the lower gears that you would need to be able to spin that at the rate, you need to keep up with your friends. And then also, when you pair it with a smaller wheel, you know, then you automatically already have a lower gear, and they tend to be scared about the smaller wheels, too. But the bike’s going to work better for a five foot two person with a 650 B, 27 and a half inch wheel than with a seven RC, because they won’t have to have the either the top tube so long or the front end laid out so far so that their their foot won’t hit the front tire. If you shorten the cranks and decrease the size of the wheel, then the bike ends up all being more proportional. The bike handles better, rides better. It’s there’s still good rolling resistance tires. It’s the system, yeah, and it just makes sense. And then similarly, with tall riders that yeah, we we sell bikes with these 750 D wheels, which is like a 36 inch. So there’s 700 C, which is the same as 29 inch for mountain bike. Then the next size up is 750 D, then there’s 32 inch, and then there’s 36 inch. So 750 D is like a 29 and a half inch, okay, maybe 30 and a half inch. And when it’s on a mountain bike, and then if the person’s also using a longer crank, so the longer crank, then you know they’re pedaling at a lower cadence. So there’s plenty of low gear, but not enough high gear. But if they wheel gets bigger, the beer gear gets higher automatically. So then everything evens out too, and that, in my mind, is the perfect world where crank length scales with person size, and so does wheel size, and then the gearing. The manufacturers don’t have to come up with all these different gear ranges either.
Speaker 2 57:15
And it seems like we’ve made a good case that for Time Trial applications, shorter cranks are a good way to go,
John Howard 57:23
absolutely. And I think we’ve seen that like Filippo, Ghana is like six four. And Taylor Finney was another example. He was, you know, I think they advertised him as six four, but he was quite a bit taller than me. He’s probably 665, or six, six. And he was using 175 cranks. Well, 175 crank for him. It’s certainly shorter than the 165 for Todd achar is, and it’s probably very similar to the 150 for vinegar guard. And so he’s getting those same advantages the vinegar guard is getting, plus he’s getting some of the other advantages that are lost to a to a big rider. A big rider is in a time trial, is discriminated against by the UCI bike design rules, which limit how far the saddle nose can come forward and how far the tip of the handlebars can be ahead of the center of the bottom bracket. Well, that one really discriminates against tall riders that not far enough forward. One discriminates against shorter riders, but if the shorter rider now has a shorter crank, then they’re more over the crank. That works out better for them with the taller rider, because they’re using this disproportionately short crank for them, then they can really drop the front end a bunch and effectively make the reach to the bar longer and get way low in the wind. And that’s definitely the what the setup that somebody like Filippo Ghana has
Trevor Connor 58:50
very good. Finally, let’s finish this episode out by hearing from Julie Young, who reminds us not to just do what we see the pros do.
Julie Young 59:00
I think it’s interesting. It’s kind of like anything else. You know, we’re lemmings. And you know, you see pogotar Going with the short crank length. So everybody’s looking for short cranks now. And for me, there’s some things that should go into that decision making. Like, for example, is it advantageous for your event? So are you an Ironman athlete and you’re in that really, you’re trying to get a low aerodynamic position and trying to open up that hip joint. Or are you a mountain biker, and maybe you’re trying to get quick, powerful accelerations reduce the rock strikes with the crank arm. But I also think what’s super like almost overrides all of that is body type and physiology. And, you know, I know for myself, like, I’ve, you know, kind of come from years of riding and racing, and always came with longer cranks. And I personally, like, I’m a little bit like, more muscular kind of have a tendency to push bigger gears. And I tried to go with a. Shorter crank, and I just absolutely hated it, and I really gave it time. I just I couldn’t do it. And so I think body type is a huge part of that decision making. So if you know, maybe, like, just to use an example, you’re a marathon runner, you’re super spindly, you get your power through higher cadences and that aerobic capacity, then you know that shorter crank might be good for you, but I think people that are again, more muscular have a tendency to push like lower cadences. I don’t know if would necessarily be a good fit, but again, I think it’s, you know, up for everyone to try it. But I do think, rather than just doing it because Pogo char is doing it, kind of have some reason for that decision making.
Speaker 2 1:00:42
All right? Well, I think we’ve covered it all. Leonard, 45 years of research and thinking about cranks in an hour. How about that? Pretty awesome. You’re getting more efficient at talking about this. That’s
John Howard 1:00:53
true. I never been short on words.
Speaker 2 1:00:57
Just one last thing, like we close out every episode we do our take homes. You get a minute to sort of summarize, give everybody out there the take home message. You almost just did that, but let’s hear it again. What’s the message here? I think
John Howard 1:01:10
the message is to do what’s appropriate for you, not what some pro is doing, and that if you’re a small person, absolutely get a small crank. If you’re a big person, maybe those little cranks are too little for you that you see as a new trend.
Chris Case 1:01:27
Trevor, I
Trevor Connor 1:01:28
think that was the most important message. So I’ll go a different direction. I’m not sure how much use this is going to be to our listeners, but I just found it really interesting going through the research, that so far, the research is pretty conclusive that there’s just no difference. 141, 80, who cares? But you always see research kind of go the same things. Did it affect Time Trial performance? Did it affect oxygen consumption? And as we just discussed, I think there’s a whole bunch of factors that that doesn’t really measure. There’s a lot of biomechanical factors. And probably the most interesting study I read looked at a lot of the biomechanical side and said, well, there was no difference in efficiency that we could measure. There are a lot of biomechanical differences, and in a lab for 20 minutes might not add up to much. You’re racing the Tour de France. It could add up to a lot. So I think this is something that isn’t fully answered, and is going to be very interesting to see how they address it.
Speaker 2 1:02:22
Chris, yeah, I mean, I think that this is another thing. This kind of echoes what Leonard said, but the pros are in a category of their own. They’re looking for every last little ounce of performance gains, and so this does make sense for them in certain applications, but for the average rider. We just talked about this. We want people to listen to this, as it’s an entertaining and thought provoking conversation, but I really don’t think that for the average rider, this means anything in a way, like they don’t have to do a whole lot.
John Howard 1:02:52
Yeah, that’s probably the biggest takeaway. You don’t have to go out and spend more money on Craigs if you don’t want to. That’s right. That’s right.
Trevor Connor 1:02:58
Everybody needs a new frame. You need your short crank frame and your long crank,
Speaker 2 1:03:05
oh boy, yes, and your TT uphill Time Trial frame and your downhill time frame.
Jeff Sankoff 1:03:13
Very good. Thanks
Chris Case 1:03:14
again. Leonard, thank you. Always a pleasure.
Trevor Connor 1:03:17
That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums dot fast talk labs.com or learn from our experts at fast talk labs.com for Leonard Zinn, Julie young, dr, Jeff sankoff, John Howard Andy Pruitt and Chris case. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
