In this week’s potluck episode, we discuss what to do when your racing data isn’t what you’d expect based on the numbers you see in training; we define muscle memory and discuss how it pertains to endurance sports; and we detail the many ways that bikes have become more aerodynamic.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Trevor Connor: Well, I was going to do the intro, but apparently Chris won’t allow me.
[00:00:08] Chris Case: I won’t ’cause you don’t know it. Hey, everyone. Welcome too fast. Talk your source for the science of endurance performance. Hey, Trevor. Hey, grant. Hey, Julie. Out there in Truckee.
[00:00:18] Grant Holicky: Think you’re trying too hard.
[00:00:20] Chris Case: I was, but
[00:00:20] Grant Holicky: okay.
[00:00:21] Trevor Connor: I love that he was staring at me the whole time.
It was just this look of. I know how to do it. No, he’s trying to, you don’t.
[00:00:27] Grant Holicky: He’s trying to,
[00:00:28] Chris Case: it’s intimidation.
[00:00:29] Grant Holicky: He’s trying to force it into your brain.
[00:00:31] Chris Case: Oh, maybe that’s what it was. Yeah. Maybe that’s what it was.
[00:00:34] Grant Holicky: Yeah. I can’t believe you still don’t know this.
[00:00:36] Trevor Connor: When we get to episode 800, I’m still gonna be
[00:00:40] Grant Holicky: reading it when, listen, if we get to episode 800, my kid’s gonna be high school across the street.
[00:00:47] Chris Case: Is that the high school he’ll go to? Yeah. Oh my gosh. We’ll be able to spy on him as he peels out from the driveway.
[00:00:53] Grant Holicky: Well, the second one will peel out. I don’t think the first one will ever peel out. No, that’s fair.
[00:00:57] Chris Case: He’d heard his violin in the backseat probably. Doesn’t he play the violin? Trombone.
Trombone. Now
[00:01:04] Grant Holicky: trombone.
[00:01:05] Trevor Connor: Those are very different instruments.
[00:01:07] Chris Case: Never. That’s true. He never
[00:01:07] Grant Holicky: played violin.
[00:01:08] Chris Case: Oh, okay. Hey. Let’s talk some cycling science. Endurance science. Yeah. We
[00:01:14] Trevor Connor: kind of got a race theme for this one.
This
[00:01:17] Chris Case: guy over here. Grant is wearing a kid. I’m wearing my fly fishing shirt for grant today.
Oh, with flies on it.
[00:01:23] Trevor Connor: Nice. That’s
[00:01:24] Chris Case: slick. You like that?
[00:01:25] Trevor Connor: Yeah.
[00:01:25] Chris Case: Isn’t that nice?
[00:01:26] Trevor Connor: It looks
[00:01:26] Grant Holicky: like my son’s size too. You can wear that. You can borrow it.
[00:01:31] Chris Case: You can borrow it. You can wear
[00:01:32] Grant Holicky: that quite easily,
[00:01:32] Chris Case: frankly. Yes. Julie, you gotta say something so people know you’re on this episode.
[00:01:38] Julie Young: I am not wearing a fly fishing shirt, nor am I wearing a kit.
[00:01:43] Chris Case: Good. That’s good. Just
[00:01:45] Julie Young: normal, plain, old clothes.
[00:01:46] Grant Holicky: Well, I’m not even riding today. I just put a kit on. You
[00:01:48] Chris Case: just put a kit on is the only thing that was clean. I wanted to feel, feel
[00:01:51] Grant Holicky: fast. You wanted to be fast.
[00:01:54] Chris Case: Well, speaking of fast, you have the first question today. I
[00:01:57] Grant Holicky: do have the first question today. So, th this came out of recent coaching, but.
I’ve had a couple athletes start asking me about, and there’s a bunch of ways we can take the answers to this, and I’m looking forward to all of them. But what they were saying to me is, I’m putting out these numbers in training and they’re really good, and I feel really confident about ’em. I feel good about ’em, and I go to racing and I’m not putting out the same numbers.
[00:02:22] Julie Young: Why?
[00:02:23] Grant Holicky: And. To start this question off, ’cause I think there’s a whole lot on the back end that we can talk about. Mm-hmm. But one of the things was I dug into a couple of these instances and they were crits with a hill in it. And I’m like, well, what are you measuring power on? Because obviously, you know, you’re doing a 60 minute cri, you’re not gonna have very high power in this.
Well, my normalized is super low. Mm-hmm. And so
[00:02:47] Chris Case: grumbles from the peanut gallery.
[00:02:50] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Well that one over there to the right of me, Mr. Connor. But I guess my question is, what should my answer be back? As a
[00:02:59] Chris Case: coach, what should you
[00:03:00] Grant Holicky: talking Yeah. As a coach. What’s the response here? I think we’ve got a real data problem.
I’ve always felt like we have a bit of a data problem. We have athletes addicted to data. The sports psychologist is not supposed to say what I’m about to say, but instead of worried about performance and results.
[00:03:16] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:16] Grant Holicky: Results. That’s what the sports psych is just not supposed to say. Sure. The, the performance is okay.
Yeah. So where’s the, who
[00:03:23] Chris Case: cares? It’s like who cares what your numbers say if you won the race. It doesn’t matter if you come in third, but you gave it your best shot. It doesn’t matter
[00:03:29] Grant Holicky: a hundred percent my feeling on it, but it’s a very hard thing to teach. Right. And coming back and having some of the metrics and understanding why this could be the case, that you could have a decoupling like this between race data mm-hmm.
And training data. I’d love to hear some of your. Pieces of input on that.
[00:03:46] Trevor Connor: I am going to give you, oh, you were ready? You are ready. I’m ready. I’m ready. I am gonna give you two personal hot takes that’s probably gonna get us a lot of angry emails.
[00:03:56] Chris Case: Wow.
[00:03:57] Trevor Connor: If you guys are ready. Not
[00:03:58] Grant Holicky: us. It won’t get us a lot of angry
[00:04:00] Trevor Connor: emails.
I won’t get a lot of, I won’t, I won’t even see them. I’ll deal with them. You might
[00:04:03] Chris Case: forward them to me,
[00:04:04] Trevor Connor: so
[00:04:04] Grant Holicky: I’d love to see ’em
[00:04:06] Trevor Connor: first, and I’m gonna intentionally state this to get those emails. I do not think normalized power is a good metric.
[00:04:13] Grant Holicky: Oh my God,
[00:04:14] Trevor Connor: thank you.
Look, I’ll give the summary of this, ’cause I’ve said this before. We have internal metrics and external metrics. So internal metric is, for example, is heart rate. It’s telling you what is going on inside the body. Power is an external metric. It doesn’t say anything about what’s going on with your body. It says, what’s going on in the bike?
Normalized power was invented to turn power into an internal metric. It’s based on how your heart rate responds to effort and then trying to translate then the power. And I can give you the whole formula, but we don’t need to go into that right now. So basically it is saying, here’s how hard the ride felt for you.
Not how hard you are actually going. And everybody’s always saying, well, here’s my normalized power for this race or for this ride. And I always go, that doesn’t tell me how fast or how strong you were riding, it just tells me how it felt for you.
[00:05:10] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:11] Trevor Connor: But everybody loves it because it’s higher than average power.
[00:05:15] Chris Case: Right.
[00:05:15] Trevor Connor: So here’s my second hot take. You are in a race. Your goal is not to put out the biggest power you can. Your goal is to win or perform well. You actually want to do that. Going as easy as possible. Right, right. For you. Right? So look, if you got dropped and you had a low normalized power, that’s an issue.
[00:05:36] Grant Holicky: Yeah. We gotta look at that, right?
[00:05:37] Trevor Connor: If you finished on the podium and you had a low normalized power, good for you.
[00:05:41] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:05:42] Chris Case: Yeah. You did it right.
[00:05:43] Grant Holicky: We’re particularly talking about road racing in this sequence too, right? I mean, the highest power from Alanon. Ramo might have been Sylvan Didier as he sat on the front for three hours, four hours, or whatever it was, but that doesn’t win a bike race.
[00:05:55] Chris Case: Nope.
[00:05:56] Grant Holicky: He was gone before they got to the copies. I agree wholeheartedly. I think that’s a brilliant take. And well, no, let me, lemme, lemme pull that back.
[00:06:06] Chris Case: 33, Paul, luck.
[00:06:07] Trevor Connor: I finally
[00:06:08] Chris Case: got heard.
[00:06:08] Grant Holicky: I, I really More
[00:06:10] Chris Case: brilliance.
[00:06:10] Grant Holicky: I really need somebody to cut that. Remember at the start of these shows. Say if there’s anything you say you don’t like, just we’ll back it up.
[00:06:17] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Trevor Connor: You know what’s gonna happen right after this episode is Grant’s going to email you to get Kelly, our audio engineer’s email just to email and be like, cut that please.
[00:06:29] Grant Holicky: I didn’t say Trevor was brilliant.
[00:06:30] Trevor Connor: There we go.
[00:06:32] Chris Case: You said it. The words that came out of his mouth pretty were assembled in a brilliant
[00:06:35] Grant Holicky: way.
Pretty good. Yeah. They were not bad. For somebody of low intelligence is him. They were brilliant.
[00:06:42] Chris Case: Wow.
[00:06:43] Grant Holicky: No, I that, I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right.
[00:06:47] Trevor Connor: That really hurt Grant.
[00:06:49] Grant Holicky: No it didn’t.
[00:06:49] Trevor Connor: My small brain had a hard time processing that. Oh boy.
[00:06:53] Grant Holicky: Me brain. Sad.
[00:06:55] Chris Case: Julie, let’s get you in
[00:06:56] Grant Holicky: here. I know you had a take on this, Julie.
I want to hear it.
[00:06:59] Julie Young: I do, and I agree so much with you, grant. Okay. I don’t think you even wanna get me started on my love hate. Of data I found it’s really challenging, especially for those athletes that have just come into sport, like with the advent or just knowing power as opposed to those who may have been in the sport prior to.
Like all the data where I think there’s a little bit more perspective and balance, but yeah, it’s like ongoing source of frustration to break athletes from that session. And it’s not just power. It’s like there’s sleep metrics, all of it. You know, it’s not in perspective, it’s not a tool then I think it can be a real spiral.
But I think for me, to your point about. Comparing the power in a race versus what they can do in training. I have found that in certain situations I can use it as a confidence builder. So to give an example, like an athlete who is in a mountain bike race, and sometimes it becomes a time trial in some respects, but let’s say she’s in, in a race, she’s with the.
Girl that’s leading and she doesn’t hold the wheel on a climb. And then we look at the power she can produce in training, and it’s so far above what she did in the race. So to me, in that way, I’ll use it as a confidence builder and reach your potential because look what you’re doing in training and you’re not even close to that in the race.
So try to kind of break through a little bit and develop more confidence in that race situation. So that’s where I would turn it around. In certain situations.
[00:08:36] Grant Holicky: Well, and I think there’s a really interesting piece to this, and I brought this study up before, there’s this beautiful study about. They did it on a climb and they did it with semi-pro or cat one cyclists, and they were having cyclists do a climb following a quote unquote teammate.
[00:08:51] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:51] Grant Holicky: Designated the person as a teammate and then as an opponent, and the power they were able to hold was higher following a teammate with everything else adjusted than they were following an opponent. How we visualize what we’re doing and how we internalize what we’re doing in terms of. Our mental strength and the sports psychology that goes along with it.
Those are really important pieces of the puzzle. And I talk a lot about the bios psychological model that how it feels matters because yes, how it feels is a representation of what’s going on in your brain, but you truly will feel it in your legs. So again, you can use power to decouple those two things, right, and say, Hey, take a look at this power when you’re following somebody Now.
What about this race over here when you went off the front and look your powers through the roof and everything leading in was very similar. I think there’s a huge piece of that puzzle, right? And the mental aspect of things of why we’re able to produce something in training when the pressure’s off, where there’s no real failure at stake.
Versus what we’re able to produce in a race setting where there is stakes, there is failure possibility. Sure. And that’s really important too.
[00:10:05] Trevor Connor: I’m glad you brought up the mental side. ’cause I do think looking at training power versus race power can show you some of the mental toughness of the athlete.
When you have an athlete who has a great mental toughness. My experience is they could always put out bigger numbers racing
[00:10:22] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:10:23] Trevor Connor: Than they can training. Yeah. I have worked with athletes who can just never put out the same sort of power training as they can racing. And so Chris knows about this athlete I worked with and the best example I saw of this was, you know, he just kept getting dropped in races and he’d say, you know, you’ll see in the files where I got dropped and I’d look in files and go, no, I don’t.
[00:10:44] Grant Holicky: Yeah,
[00:10:44] Trevor Connor: exactly. I just don’t. So I finally said, you know, we were good distance apart. I said, let’s get on Zift and do a zift race together.
[00:10:51] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:51] Trevor Connor: And we hit this hill on the Zift race and he got popped holding 310 watts, which is relevant because three days earlier I had given him threshold intervals doing 10 minute thresholds, and he was holding 3 50, 360 watts.
Right?
[00:11:10] Grant Holicky: Right.
[00:11:10] Trevor Connor: So I sitting there, literally we were on discord. I’m sitting there going, why are you getting popped right now? It’s like, I can’t hang around. It’s too hard. I’m like. You were doing 50 watts higher training.
[00:11:18] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:11:19] Trevor Connor: So it’s mental. Yeah. He gets into a race and just feels like he can’t hate
[00:11:23] Grant Holicky: it.
Right. And he’ll feel that piece of the puzzle in his legs, right? Mm-hmm. And it’s just that idea of what’s on the line. Mm-hmm. In a lot of ways. I mean, the best way to describe mental toughness is performance. It’s mental performance training. That’s what we talk about. And whether that’s performance on a bike, whether that’s performance in front of other people, this is a performance.
[00:11:45] Chris Case: Mm-hmm. Not a very good one.
[00:11:46] Grant Holicky: No, and I’m, I’m not like this, normally, this is a performance. I don’t talk to anybody. Chris knows this.
[00:11:53] Chris Case: I don’t either. So I don’t know that you don’t talk to me
[00:11:56] Grant Holicky: The most social we ever are. So the mental piece of the puzzle can be very dramatic there. Right? Either way. While your raise numbers are higher or your training numbers are lower.
There’s one last thing that I want to throw out there at this, and Julie, you alluded to it, I, when we were off air when we were talking about, well, is it a time trial? Is it a long climb on a gravel race? Is it a mountain bike? Is it some of these things that are truly solo efforts? Or are you at the mercy of a group?
If we’re in a bike race, typically, and we’re at the mercy of a group, it surges, it punches, it lets off. There’s complete zeros. There’s numbers that are through the roof. We’re all over the map.
[00:12:35] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:36] Grant Holicky: And for a lot of people, if we’re not training that way, if we’re not putting that high, this is my soapbox.
If we’re not training with that high end and we’re coming in and we’re not used to that high end repeatability and training, then that in and of itself. Feels exhausting. And you can get into W Prime, you can get into all these pieces where, how long do you have to live above threshold, but that’s, racing is a lot of time that it’s just gonna feel different.
And in some ways, I think this is why people love to depend on that normalized power metric. Right? Because you look at the graph in a bike race and it looks like it’s all over the map. Yeah. And people wanna make some sense of that. Okay, what does this mean towards my threshold? In some ways, it doesn’t mean anything towards your threshold unless you’re doing a time trial or a long climb or something along those lines.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:13:27] Julie Young: Jumping back a little bit, grant, I wanted to comment on what you had said about the difference between leading a race or following.
[00:13:34] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:13:35] Julie Young: And how different, and I’ve for sure seen that. And the one rider I’m kind of describing in this example, I mean, that’s a hundred percent. Like she’s leading, she’s going hard.
If the minute somebody else takes over, she folds early.
[00:13:49] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:49] Julie Young: So that’s a big part of it. And I think kind of what you had said is being able to bring that training mentality to the race. And so one day it’s like, let’s not overthink this. I mean, I think in some, and often we have to be super smart as racers, like that’s the way we win.
[00:14:03] Grant Holicky: Right.
[00:14:04] Julie Young: And you have to be confident and patient. But on the other side of it, sometimes we can’t overthink it. And so one race I just said to her, Hey, this is. Just like intervals on Wednesday. And that was a total breakthrough for her. Like that.
[00:14:17] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:14:18] Julie Young: Allowed her to totally unleash and she had a total breakthrough race.
You know, just not overthinking it, just go out there and attack it like you would an interval. It’s the same thing. You’re going hard, you’re recovering, you’re going hard. You’re recovering.
[00:14:30] Grant Holicky: Yeah. And I think that’s a really good take. And I think one of the things that. Playing with that of like, you don’t have anything to lose.
Let’s just go mess up the game. And I’ve said that to so many athletes. I don’t care if you win or lose, go hurt somebody. Just go hurt somebody and they’ll go to the front and suddenly they’re just putting the pain to people and that’s where they thrive instead of the results. And I think you see that in the pro road, Peloton.
There’s a, there’s seven guys on that team that are working for Todd. What’s their job to hurt everybody else? Their job doesn’t have anything to do with winning.
[00:15:02] Chris Case: Some people thrive in that role, right? They wouldn’t want to be in the front. No. At the end of the race, no. They wanna do their work and get out of the way
[00:15:09] Grant Holicky: a hundred percent.
And I race cross and I, you know, try to do well in cross, but when I race road with the guys that I race road with, I never walk into those races going, Hey, I wanna be a leader, guys, just, what do you want me to do?
[00:15:20] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:20] Grant Holicky: I’d really like to, you know, just hurt some guys.
[00:15:23] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:24] Grant Holicky: The other thing that’s important, if we’re talking about dirt, we’re talking about climbing, we’re talking about things where the speed is lower than, what, 12 miles an hour?
How much does the draft really matter? Mm-hmm. Like there’s a pacing benefit to it to follow somebody. But again, that’s psychological and mental too. We put so much, I can’t tell you how many times I hear people scream on the side of the Cyclo Cross course, get off the front. I’m like, why? They’re going 12.
Why There’s, I mean, control the race from a technical standpoint. If you’re on the front and you can accelerate outta the corners, you’ll put everybody on your wheel.
[00:15:56] Trevor Connor: Exactly. I was gonna say, cyclecross is technical. If you’re on somebody’s wheel, you’re forced to go their pace, their line.
[00:16:03] Grant Holicky: Well, I even had an athlete talk about coming out of a Tucson bicycle classic with the crit there.
It was the six corner crit or seven corner crit. He got off the front with somebody else and I said, man, like that was a really impressive job to hold that break. He goes, actually, no, it wasn’t like they can’t trade off back there.
[00:16:19] Trevor Connor: Right?
[00:16:20] Grant Holicky: If I’m on the front with two dudes and they’re committed. There’s not six guys back there that can exchange like that because there’s too many corners to break up the molt.
So he is like I, I could honestly almost be on the front solo, and if I’m accelerating out of each one of those corners and taking the corners fast enough, there’s not that many people back there that can ride it faster than me, which is a great point and a great take, and not something we think about in this day and age where it’s aerodynamics and drafting and all those things.
[00:16:47] Chris Case: Yep. Mm-hmm.
[00:16:48] Grant Holicky: Next question.
[00:16:49] Chris Case: Next question. Sure. This is about. Muscle memory. I feel like that term is used quite often. Probably more so in skill-based sports, tennis, basketball, these types of things where you hear the term used for people get, have muscle memory for what their shot needs to be like or whatever the case may be, but maybe this.
Applies to cycling, maybe it applies to running. So the first part of the question is, what the heck are we talking about when somebody uses the term muscle memory and how does it apply to cycling, to running, to endurance sports that aren’t skill-based?
[00:17:28] Trevor Connor: Okay. So I’m gonna start by saying I did something I don’t normally do.
[00:17:32] Chris Case: Uh oh, you looked,
[00:17:34] Trevor Connor: hold up Gemini, ais.
[00:17:36] Chris Case: Sure.
[00:17:37] Trevor Connor: And asked it, what is the definition of muscle memory?
[00:17:40] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:41] Trevor Connor: And the definition it gave me is not at all what I was expecting.
[00:17:44] Chris Case: Oh, really?
[00:17:45] Trevor Connor: Oh, okay. So I’m just gonna throw this out there, but we can define it however we want. They say Muscle memory refers to the process by which the brain consolidates a specific motor task into memory through repetitive practice, allowing the movement to eventually be performed with little to no conscious effort.
Physiologically, this involves a strengthening of neural pathways and long-term changes in the primary motor cortex and cerebellum. Streamlined the coordination of muscle activation.
[00:18:15] Grant Holicky: Okay. But this just begs the que, what the heck did you think the definition was?
[00:18:19] Trevor Connor: I was actually thinking of it as being more local.
Being more
[00:18:24] Grant Holicky: Oh, in the muscle.
[00:18:25] Trevor Connor: Yeah. Being, seeing adaptations in the muscle that don’t go away.
[00:18:29] Grant Holicky: Okay, that makes sense. That makes
[00:18:31] Trevor Connor: sense. But no, I like this definition, so let’s talk about
[00:18:33] Grant Holicky: that. When I was in school for sports psych, we did a lot on pedagogy. Mm-hmm. For sport. Right. How do you teach sport?
Mm-hmm. How do you teach repetitive motion? How do you teach those things? I think the best way for me to talk about this is the opposite of muscle memory is choking. Mm-hmm. It’s March madness going on right now. If you watch a guy go up to the free throw line, it’s late in a game. This is for the win, and he just bricks it,
[00:19:00] Chris Case: airball,
[00:19:00] Grant Holicky: airball, bricks it, whatever.
I love the fact that choking is the technical term in sports psych, right? Mm-hmm. Like he choked and we all use it. I grew up saying he choked and then I got to school and I went, wait, that’s actually the technical term. That’s amazing. But what,
[00:19:16] Chris Case: or the yips in baseball, don’t they? That the same
[00:19:18] Grant Holicky: thing? It’s same deal,
[00:19:18] Chris Case: right?
[00:19:19] Grant Holicky: It’s the same deal. And basically what it is, is it’s putting conscious thought. Into a movement or an activity that is rote and does not require any conscious thought, and your muscles and your nerves and your brain can’t keep up with the speed that’s required. Mm-hmm. If you’re consciously thinking through something, so where you teach something is you slow it down at first.
You go through it very slowly, and then you build the speed up, or you build the power up, or you build the intensity up as you go through so that you still have the same degree of control, the same degree of technical capability. As you’re increasing the power that’s placed into it or the speed of repeatability, this is what we used to do in swimming.
We’d start with really long strokes. I’d do a lot with my team on stroke count. And then we would say, keep the same stroke count, increase the speed as quickly as you possibly can, or go as fast as you can with the same stroke count or stroke count plus one, stroke count plus two. So it was this really slow environment to learn the movement, and then you increased everything as you went on.
This is the whole idea behind the old Russian Tennis Player Method, or even some of the Scandinavian methods of teaching ball sports. You don’t compete until the age of 12 or 13. It’s all mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, because their theory is competing, just screws up the mechanics. ’cause you try to win or you try to go fast.
[00:20:49] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:49] Grant Holicky: Which I love that, but it’s never gonna work in the United States. So it’s kind of moot here. But that’s the idea behind it. So you can look at that in terms of how we teach now, if we look at muscle memory with cycling and running. Totally different animal to an extent. Mm-hmm. Because it’s not the same dextrous movement.
I think it’s really important. I think it’s really relevant.
[00:21:12] Chris Case: So you think muscle memory when it comes to bunny hopping barriers and cyclocross, yes.
[00:21:17] Grant Holicky: No
[00:21:17] Chris Case: brainer.
[00:21:17] Grant Holicky: Right.
[00:21:18] Chris Case: But the pedal stroke, do you think it applies?
[00:21:20] Grant Holicky: Yes, I do think it applies. I would almost look at it more from a running perspective, because where I really think there’s technical aspects of running, I think there’s technical aspects of cycling.
But I think if we think about running as a technical piece, it helps bridge the gap because running looks like such a repetitive motion and you can see, no offense to some people out there just terrible technical runners running very fast.
[00:21:45] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:45] Grant Holicky: Right? But you see the same thing on a bike we go by, I mean, we ride with people in races in the pack, and you’re like, oh God, what does that fit?
Or what is that position? Or What are your knees doing? And they’re going incredibly fast. You can create speed with. Poor muscle movement.
[00:22:01] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:02] Grant Holicky: But to me, the very best runners in the world typically look a certain way.
[00:22:08] Trevor Connor: Sure, yep.
[00:22:09] Grant Holicky: And there’s a reason for that.
[00:22:10] Trevor Connor: Yep.
[00:22:11] Grant Holicky: But that’s the same thing. You can see incredibly good swimmers in their straight arm recovery, or they’re all over the place with their recovery.
And we, as a lot of swim coaches have just given up on recovery. Doesn’t matter. Just get the arm to the front.
[00:22:25] Chris Case: I think there’s also something to be said for the fact that if it works,
[00:22:29] Grant Holicky: fix it. Don’t
[00:22:30] Chris Case: mess with it too much. Don’t fix it. Like if that’s the way somebody,
[00:22:33] Grant Holicky: if that’s their muscle
[00:22:34] Chris Case: memory, if that’s their muscle memory and it doesn’t quote, look good.
That’s irrelevant ’cause it works for them. So don’t try to mess it up
[00:22:42] Grant Holicky: as it’s not, as long as it’s not hurting them, right? Yeah. Yeah. If you’ve got, if you’ve got pain or chronic pain caused by some sort of weird movement, then you have to try to change that movement. But you’re a hundred percent right trying to change a stroke or a form.
Ooh. It almost does more damage than good. Mm-hmm.
[00:22:59] Julie Young: This might be a little bit of a tangent, but just a couple questions. Grant, from a psych perspective, so do you think routine helps to trigger that muscle memory? So I’m thinking of like you’re talking about the choke and I’m thinking about Steph Curry.
And his free throws and how methodical he is with his routine and his like mouth guards in his mouth and like he has his routine down. So I’m wondering if that plays a part in his muscle memory.
[00:23:25] Grant Holicky: There’s two really big pieces of that puzzle. One is, the better your routine is, the better you can use it to block out everything else.
Not even block out everything else, but push everything else outta your mind. One of the really big tricks with nerves or choking is that. The nerves, the choking, the stress. That doesn’t go away. It’s always there. You can’t just ignore it. You can’t eliminate it. You can’t do anything that, what you try to do is fill the space so fully.
There’s no room for those other questions, right? So that’s what Curry or somebody like that’s doing when they go to the line. They’re so dedicated to their routine. They’re so dedicated to their stepwise preparation. Golfers, you see it in golfers all
[00:24:05] Chris Case: the time. Golfers serve tennis. Yes, for the serve, there’s how many bounces they bounce at.
Fix their shorts, do the thing right before you put, you do the, have the whole routine. Yes.
[00:24:14] Grant Holicky: So all of those allows you to force everything else out of the frame of consciousness. So absolutely that routine makes a huge difference. There’s a great scene from an old baseball movie with Kevin Costner for the love of the game.
When he says, clear the mechanism and it’s this, this whole idea. And
[00:24:30] Trevor Connor: then he can towards the
[00:24:31] Grant Holicky: end, right, because it’s just too much going on. So that’s one of those things. But the other thing that is a really good way to prep for that environment is to, this is why I am convinced, this is why NBA players bet in practice when you go back and you listen to some of, you read some of their memoirs and stuff like that, they’re putting down massive bets in practice on shots or free throw streaks.
Gilbert Arenas was famous for this with his three point shooting. It creates stress. It creates pressure. So you’re practicing in a high stress, high stakes environment, which gives you the same tools to prepare to compete in a high stakes, high stress environment. So there’s even coaches and golfers and tennis players that will recreate crowd noise.
They’ll recreate. All the stressors that go along with it, or even just stress them in another way so that they’re trying to hit shots or make performances under load. Some sort of cognitive load.
[00:25:31] Trevor Connor: You are gonna laugh at what I’m thinking about right now.
[00:25:35] Grant Holicky: I’m already laughing.
[00:25:36] Trevor Connor: This weekend. I went to a concert.
I saw, do you remember Casey and the Sunshine Band?
[00:25:41] Grant Holicky: I do remember. Wow.
[00:25:42] Trevor Connor: So this is, they were one of the bands that basically invented disco. Look ’em up. Like you know, their songs.
[00:25:50] Grant Holicky: I can’t believe, can’t believe they’re still alive. People look them up. I can’t, I can’t believe they’re still alive either.
[00:25:55] Trevor Connor: I love the way he described it.
’cause he is sitting up on stage and it just goes. For any of you younger women out here who don’t know who I am, I’m your mom. I used to in sync and then he points at his face. He’s like, this is what Justin Timberlake’s gonna look like in 30 years.
[00:26:09] Chris Case: Oh my God.
[00:26:10] Trevor Connor: But first of all, I gotta say it was a great concert.
He’s a great entertainer, but he. Had dancers up on stage and he would go and dance with them. And all I could think is, I’m sure he was a great dancer in the seventies.
[00:26:25] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:25] Trevor Connor: He’s got zero muscle memory,
[00:26:31] Chris Case: or he’s had two hip replacements, two knee replacements from all the, and he can’t actually physically do it anymore. Can’t
[00:26:38] Grant Holicky: make that movement anymore.
[00:26:40] Chris Case: So I was wondering where this was going
[00:26:41] Grant Holicky: since we were talking about Yeah, that was, that was a really interesting segue. But it worked. I’m sorry.
[00:26:46] Trevor Connor: That is where my small brain went to.
[00:26:49] Grant Holicky: Trevor’s small brain. Good connection. Yes.
[00:26:52] Trevor Connor: Well, look, one serious thing I will add to this, ’cause you’re talking about cognitive load way our brains work, simplification. We build what are called cognitions. So the example I always give people is you’re driving a car, somebody tells you to turn left. You know exactly what they’re thinking.
That’s not a hard thing to do. That’s a cognition. If you had somebody who’s never been in a car before driving and you had to describe to them how to turn left, there’s all sorts of things involved. Mm-hmm. Put on the turn signal. You have to take your foot off the gas, put it on the brake. You have to know when to start turning.
How much to turn the wheel. Look the mirror. Look for cars. The mirror. Yeah. Mirror. There’s so many parts to this. If you didn’t have that cognition. If you had to think about every single step and you were going at decent speed, you’d be on the sidewalk.
[00:27:43] Grant Holicky: Oh, always. Always. Right.
[00:27:44] Trevor Connor: And I think that’s a lot of what we’re talking about with this cognitive low is you have to build those cognitions If you’re, so you talked about runners.
If you’re a runner and you have to think about your running stroke during a race. You’re not gonna perform well, no.
[00:27:58] Grant Holicky: And this is where you can draw it back to running and cycling. If you’re running up a hill, there’s a different stride than if you’re running on a flat or running downhill. Actually, one of the hardest things to teach people to do is run downhill.
Mm-hmm. And not break. Not slow down, not put pressure on the quads. Same thing on the bike. What are you doing when you get up to sprint? What do you do when you get up to stand? Or what are you doing at low cadence or high cadence? I encourage my athletes to sprint at the end of every single ride except their easy rides.
Mm-hmm. I want you to do an all out sprint, because a sprint is muscle memory. What gear do I need to be in? How do I move the bike? How am I whipping this around? I need to be at a much higher cadence than I typically think I need to be at in a sprint. So it gets them to understand what that’s going to feel like after an interval ride, after a base ride, after a group ride, after all those pieces.
So there’s a, I think there’s a huge piece. To muscle memory in the endurance sports. It’s just not necessarily as intricate.
[00:29:01] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:01] Grant Holicky: As it is in maybe a ball sport. I will say this, it
[00:29:04] Chris Case: also happens a lot of the time at high speeds,
[00:29:07] Grant Holicky: at very high speed. I will say this, I will say one thing about it, and again, comes back to swimming, which is another, I think, bridge sport, right?
It’s not throwing a baseball, but there’s some technique involved in it. Sure. I swam through college. I didn’t do a whole lot of swimming after that until I was probably 26, 27, and I started swimming again. I remember racing one of the kids at 25 years old and we did a 50 breaststroke, and I think the fastest I ever went in high school or in college was 25 low or something, and I went 26 2.
Which I had no business doing. There’s no fitness there. There was no strength there. It was purely just remembering how to do the dive, how to do the pull out, how to do the kick, how to do the pull, and how to do a fast turn. Could I do it for 150? Could I do it for 200 yards? No, I would’ve fallen apart. I would’ve blown up, but I could do it for 50 because there wasn’t a strength or endurance component.
It was purely remembering how to do it. I think if you put a really good sprinter on a bike. At 40 years old and they haven’t necessarily been on a bike. Might take ’em a couple sprints to figure it out, but pretty quickly they’re gonna be really fast. Cavendish would still be really quick on a bike.
[00:30:24] Trevor Connor: Agreed. But you know, the one suggestion I’ll have to all of our listeners is going back to that car example. If you’re thinking about all the steps of turning, you’re gonna end up on the sidewalk. Mm-hmm. If you’re going fast. You. If you are thinking about these things in a race, you haven’t practiced it enough, you need to develop this muscle memory, learn these skills in training.
[00:30:45] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:30:45] Trevor Connor: So that when you’re in a race, you aren’t thinking about it.
[00:30:48] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:30:48] Trevor Connor: You just do it.
[00:30:49] Grant Holicky: You do what I did today. You go and you ride in to the Fast Talk offices on the Boulder Creek path, and that’ll keep your skills sharp because you never know what somebody’s gonna do.
[00:31:01] Chris Case: That’s true.
[00:31:01] Julie Young: I have a couple things to add in terms of like.
Chris, you had said typically this happens at high speeds. Mm-hmm. And I believe that, I believe like when we ride and run faster and harder, that’s when we actually typically run and ride better. Mm-hmm. Like mechanically better. And I do feel like it is when you’re more mentally engaged in the movement. I think that’s important for the muscle memory.
Another thing, kind of back to Grant, I think when we started this conversation on this topic, you had said something about kind of taking the mind out of it, and one thing that that I thought about is like you had described kind of that skill development and how when something’s really technically demanding, like a technically demanding sport, you have to.
Break it apart into pieces and kind of analyze those pieces. But then I think at a certain point you have to learn to put it all together. And I’ve read this in a scientific study. One of the best ways to do a skill, like a really highly demanding skill focused movement is by watching because.
Essentially you put that focus on that external and it takes your thinking mind out of it, so you’re not hyper analyzing all of your movements and you actually perform better. So I think that’s, to me, like in mountain biking, when you’re learning those skills, yes, you have to initially break ’em down and kind of to your point, do them slowly, but then putting it all together by watching riders in front of you.
I think that’s one of the best ways to learn and to put it all together.
[00:32:34] Grant Holicky: There is a great study. On performance. Having athletes play video games before a performance and having them watch high level performance before performance and their performance increases dramatically after having watched high performers immediately before performing.
[00:32:52] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:52] Grant Holicky: It’s really interesting and always used to drive me crazy that my swimmers didn’t wanna watch swimming, and it’s the same thing. My cyclists don’t watch a lot of cycling on tv. I’m like, God, why not? Like this is all your tactical practice right here. Just watch it. See it over and over again.
[00:33:08] Chris Case: That’s why Trevor watches American Flyer before every race he does.
[00:33:14] Trevor Connor: That is not untrue.
[00:33:16] Chris Case: It’s either that Rocky or Chariots of Fire. Right. Those are the three that you probably I don’t watch
[00:33:21] Trevor Connor: Chariots of Fire.
[00:33:21] Chris Case: No. Well, you’re not a runner,
[00:33:23] Trevor Connor: Rocky us. I get enough from those other two. That’s all you need.
[00:33:29] Grant Holicky: Alright.
[00:33:29] Trevor Connor: Well, my favorite part of American Flyers is the, when they’re racing the cowboys on horses.
[00:33:35] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
[00:33:36] Trevor Connor: And he goes, watch this trick, and then he shifts into his big chain ring.
[00:33:41] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:33:42] Trevor Connor: I’m like, wow. That’s advanced strategy right there.
[00:33:45] Grant Holicky: Well, I will say this, after riding with my seven and 10-year-old in Moab Ball week, shifting is apparently an advanced strategy there you.
[00:33:54] Chris Case: Some people struggle with that.
[00:33:56] Grant Holicky: Yes, they like their single speed.
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[00:35:36] Grant Holicky: Speaking of bikes, Trevor,
[00:35:38] Trevor Connor: oh, I’ve been looking forward to this question. Here’s the retro grouch question.
[00:35:42] Grant Holicky: Yeah, dude. Just a grumpy old man.
[00:35:45] Trevor Connor: I am a grumpy old man.
[00:35:47] Grant Holicky: I can buy you some more wool kit.
[00:35:50] Chris Case: Keep going to those KC and the Sunshine Band concerts and cheer up a little bit. Would you?
[00:35:55] Grant Holicky: Come on champ. Get out your toe
[00:35:57] Trevor Connor: clips. Let’s go. I have seen actually in the last year, a couple old performers and damn, they do good shows. That was a good show. I saw Paul McCartney in the fall.
[00:36:05] Grant Holicky: Paul McCartney was amazing, and Casey and the Sunshine Band are not in the same category.
[00:36:12] Trevor Connor: He actually talked about how we met Paul McCartney and they collaborated.
[00:36:15] Chris Case: I’m sure he did. It’s this one Claim to fame.
[00:36:18] Grant Holicky: Listen, if I met Paul McCartney, I’d talk about it pretty much every day.
[00:36:25] Trevor Connor: All right. My question, as you know, as a retro grouch, I am generally a believer that because of weight restrictions and rules about the look of a bike, bikes basically peaked around 2012, 2013, and they haven’t gotten any faster. They may be more fun, but they haven’t gotten any faster. That said, I went for a ride with one of my athletes.
Who was on very expensive, very new bike. This was in the fall and we were riding on the flats together and I kept telling him, slow down. You are going too hard. And he’s like, no, I’m right in my power range. I’m like, I don’t believe it. ’cause I’m at three 20 watts. And he is like, I promise you I’m at two 20.
And he was killing me and I didn’t believe him until he sent me the file and I literally put my file next to his file. I’m like, yeah, I was doing a hundred watts more than he was doing at at, at a lot of points on this ride. So I do wonder, have we seen improvements in the aerodynamics of the, and I love both of you, head bang.
[00:37:28] Grant Holicky: It’s kind of a no brainer. Y’all fart.
[00:37:32] Chris Case: I mean, don’t get me wrong. Cycling brands spend a lot of money marketing. They also spent an enormous amount of money in wind tunnels making improvements to bikes.
[00:37:43] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:37:44] Chris Case: Yeah. So to answer your question simply yes, bikes have improved since 2014 in terms of their aerodynamics to make them faster in a straight line and in crosswinds and in all ya angles,
[00:37:56] Grant Holicky: well and everything along with it wheels.
Handlebars
[00:38:01] Chris Case: cleaner, cockpits with fewer cable. No cables
[00:38:04] Grant Holicky: at this table, no cables, a socks, shoes. I think one of the biggest things that’s changed in the last 10 years is position on a bike.
[00:38:12] Chris Case: Sure.
[00:38:13] Grant Holicky: When you go out and you watch people just on training, rides base, training rides, they’re in an arrow position.
There’s a couple of my athletes that I ride with that are down, they’re low and it, I’m in the same place. I’m like, I’m trying to ride comfortably nice and high, and I can’t, I have to get low and I have to get tight. So it’s not just the bike. It’s like everything along with it. The changes have been fairly, I think they’ve been fairly dramatic now.
I think there’s a lot of things, to your point, Trevor, out there that
[00:38:44] Chris Case: you’re on a, you’re comparing this to a 2014 tarmac.
[00:38:47] Trevor Connor: I have two race bikes. Both are actually from 2014. One is a Fuji, one is a specialized,
[00:38:53] Chris Case: yeah,
[00:38:54] Grant Holicky: let’s throw the Fuji out metaphor. No, I’m joking that, I mean that 2014 tarmac was a pretty solid bike.
[00:39:03] Chris Case: But that’s 12 years ago, and so many aerody bikes that were purpose built for aerodynamics, all of that technology has trickled into the climbing bikes, the endurance bikes, all those different categories. So there’s been. Significant improvements there in terms of tube shapes. You couldn’t even call them tubes.
They’re not tubes anymore. Right? They’re,
[00:39:26] Trevor Connor: and that is something on both of my bikes, they’re still pretty round tubing.
[00:39:29] Grant Holicky: And one of the things that really came from triathlon bikes was, and you’re talking about the cockpit, but even the head tube. Design into almost a fairing as it comes back. And even on the bikes that aren’t built like that, they’re not the factor that factor with it almost looks like there’s a rectangle on the front.
Right. But even the bikes that aren’t built that way, you see an elongation of that. Whereas instead it used to just be around front tube. Mm-hmm. Head tube, even on the carbon bikes. There was a round Trevor. I would go so far as to say that the aerodynamic improvements in the last 10 to 12 years. Dwarf, those that happened anytime before 2014,
[00:40:10] Trevor Connor: I would buy that simply because the technology on building bikes has improved so much.
There’s things they can do now that even if they knew about it before, they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it.
[00:40:20] Chris Case: And I think that people also, in the world of cycling, it was an extremely, it’s a very. History driven, dogmatic sort of sport. No. Whether it comes to training or some of these other things, like it’s steeped in, you gotta do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s why we had tire pressures at 120 PSI for so long, but now, now we’re talking about people are running rim widths that are literally twice as wide as. What people ran in 2014, which means the tire is also wider and they’ve proven at this point that’s faster, right? Mm-hmm. And pressures are faster.
So you add all of these things up, 10 watts here, eight watts there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When it comes to sort of the shape and cleanliness of the air passing over the body. Yeah. The bike and the wheels, and especially the rotating. Elements and you’ve got a hundred watts, literally
[00:41:17] Grant Holicky: and helmet.
[00:41:18] Trevor Connor: That’s what I was wondering because you know, I don’t always love talking about marginal gains. People are spending fortunes adds, adds up to get this little thing. Yeah, yeah. And one single thing you look at and go, that doesn’t make a big difference. That’s what I’m wondering. Have we hit the point where there’s so many of these little marginal gains and now is added
[00:41:33] Grant Holicky: up?
We’ll take a second, right? Take a second. It’s funny because I’ll go to the stages ride on Tuesday sometimes. It was a pretty fast group ride here. And I’ve got some friends that that joke, but they’re not joking that when they go to that ride, deeper dish wheels,
[00:41:47] Chris Case: absolutely
[00:41:48] Grant Holicky: skin suit, aero socks, the arrow helmet, gloves that they normally wouldn’t wear.
Ribbed shoulders like you start at one bottle, the things that they’re doing, and I’m rocking up to this rod and going, I’m on my training wheels with normal socks and a normal kit. It makes a difference. Now, I don’t know that I’m gonna throw all those things in there because whatever, if it get drops, not the end of the world.
And I don’t know that I care that much, but start going up the list. Shoe covers, chain rings, wheels, widths, and tire pressures. Frame. It’s probably the least of it right now.
[00:42:28] Chris Case: Handlebar width, cockpit
[00:42:30] Grant Holicky: cleanliness,
[00:42:31] Chris Case: cock
[00:42:31] Grant Holicky: tape. Yeah. I mean, people aren’t even taping the tops on the bars because there’s an aerodynamic advantage.
Helmet position, gloves, clothing kit. I mean, we just went through five things, no, 10 things. Mm-hmm. And, and if each one of those things is three watts, now that’s 30 watts. That’s. Noticeable, but I remember when I was a triathlete and we were talking about in a 40 K time trial, the difference of an arrow helmet to a regular helmet was like three or four minutes.
[00:43:03] Trevor Connor: Yep. No, that’s fair.
[00:43:04] Grant Holicky: So I do think there’s a big change, and I’m with you. I hate the idea that you can buy speed.
[00:43:10] Trevor Connor: The thing that actually kills me is if I upgrade my bike a year ago. Yeah. I brought a, bought a brand new set of zip three Oh threes. For 250 bucks. That basically came with the message of, seriously, you’re still using rim brakes?
Like, we never thought we were gonna sell these ever.
[00:43:30] Grant Holicky: Right, right, right.
[00:43:31] Trevor Connor: So now I have to go back to paying a lot for good wheels.
[00:43:33] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I mean, you do. But one of the things that I do think is true about this stuff is it’s the slow march. I think that’s part of what does it, right. If you look at the difference between 2025 and 2026, you’re probably not seeing anything too big, radically different in and of itself.
But again, if you’re talking about a 12 year change and somebody’s finding 10 watts a year, it’s 120 watts. That’s plus the speeds in general are higher, and as the speeds are higher, the gains are higher. Right. In terms of a aerodynamic advantage, if we’re talking 15 miles an hour, there’s not. The same advantage.
But if I look at my rides of what I’m doing from a speed perspective on the same training ride I did 12 years ago, as I’m doing now, I think I’m going reverse aging.
[00:44:21] Chris Case: Mm.
[00:44:21] Grant Holicky: And I’m not. I can tell you how it feels and sounds when I get out of bed in the morning. I’m getting older every single day, but I’m going faster on a bike.
There’s no doubt about it
[00:44:31] Chris Case: with others around you.
[00:44:32] Grant Holicky: Yeah, absolutely. Right. Not of my own devices, but Right. If I go today, I’m gonna go mighty slu.
[00:44:40] Trevor Connor: Well, I mean, the other example I saw this last week, I was actually down at the PanAm Championships and I drove the car for a time. Trial is in the race and this was not, this team’s.
Lead time trial is the guy they were expecting to get the results. This was kind of their backup guy. So it was a 43 K time trial and he did about 52 minutes and it was not a turn your head time. And I’m sitting there going 15, 20 years ago, this would’ve been a race winning time. At a decent race
[00:45:11] Grant Holicky: it would’ve been epic.
Yeah. It’s night and day. The speed, purely the speed that is being traveled is pretty ridiculous because you start adding all those things up and they’re little things, but they add up. And I mean, again, this comes back to it like, okay, if they’re in the wind tunnel and a shoe cover gives you four watts, you’re like, oh, four watts.
What’s it matter? But over the course of three hours for these guys, or four hours, or six hours in San Ramo. It’s a lot of watts.
[00:45:42] Chris Case: This is part of the reason why you’ve seen something like an unbound record winning time go from 13 hours to nine, like four hours difference. I know it is a different caliber of racer.
[00:45:56] Grant Holicky: Yep,
[00:45:57] Chris Case: for sure. But they’ve brought a lot of, a lot of that, the technology, they’re buying speed in a way to mm-hmm. To do better, because these races are so incredibly long.
[00:46:07] Trevor Connor: Yep. Alright. I will go find myself a good 2018 bike.
[00:46:14] Grant Holicky: Amazing.
[00:46:16] Chris Case: Great. Sounds great.
[00:46:18] Grant Holicky: Sounds faster.
[00:46:20] Trevor Connor: So what’s the take home for our listeners? I mean, the obvious one, if you’re an idiot like me and you’re still on a bike from 2014, time to upgrade. But what about for the rest of our listeners? Are we saying. Year to year doesn’t make a big difference. But over time, or
[00:46:36] Chris Case: I would say this, if you wanna win races, you kind of have to have the equipment to win races.
It’s an arms race these days.
[00:46:45] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:46:45] Chris Case: If you’re not interested in that, I go to the stages, ride on a. Round tube titanium bike with whatever on it. I don’t care. It makes the training rides harder, harder.
[00:46:58] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm.
[00:46:58] Chris Case: Yeah. So there’s that. And I’m not gonna go try to race on that bike, but show up with whatever you want, but have the expectation of if I’m on this and they’re on that, I’m gonna be working harder to go the same speed.
[00:47:11] Grant Holicky: I have said this for years, for different reasons. And this is a hard thing to convince people of. This is where I will say, your components don’t matter. You don’t need dura Ace. Go get. I don’t even think they make 1 0 5 anymore, but go coming
[00:47:26] Chris Case: back,
[00:47:27] Grant Holicky: bring the lower end componentry and put the money into the cockpit.
The frame
[00:47:33] Chris Case: wheels.
[00:47:33] Grant Holicky: Yeah, the wheels and things like that.
[00:47:36] Chris Case: Yep.
[00:47:36] Grant Holicky: Weight is less of an issue than it ever was before. Two your point, because of the weight restrictions on the bikes and things like that. And honestly it’s less of an issue than we thought it was because weight really matters when you’re climbing.
When it’s flat, it doesn’t matter nearly as much. And you know, Chris and I are gonna struggle when we go to the stages ride and it’s super windy like it was on Tuesday. Mm-hmm. And I’m getting absolutely hanging on for dear life because the wind makes, it changes everything.
[00:48:05] Julie Young: Mm-hmm.
[00:48:06] Grant Holicky: But if it’s not a windy ride, yeah.
It’s a little bit harder to go, you know, have fun. But yeah, if you’re trying to win races, yeah, you probably gotta do it. Hate to say it.
[00:48:14] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:48:15] Grant Holicky: On that note, everyone.
[00:48:17] Chris Case: Yes, grant,
[00:48:17] Grant Holicky: this has been another example of Trevor’s age.
That’s all I can say. And age is not a number. Age is a vibe, man. It’s a vibe.
[00:48:29] Trevor Connor: Hey, Casey’s still out doing it at 75.
[00:48:32] Grant Holicky: Okay. Boomer.
[00:48:33] Trevor Connor: I got a couple years left in me.
[00:48:36] Grant Holicky: Okay. Boomer.
[00:48:37] Chris Case: Julie, is there anything you want to add into the bike aerodynamics conversation or do you wanna just leave it there?
[00:48:45] Grant Holicky: Do you wanna record a quick insult of Trevor just to join us?
Fun.
[00:48:49] Julie Young: Yeah, that that would be awesome. Yeah. I was just gonna say like I’m a very cynical consumer to a fault, so I kind of land in Trevor’s camp. I think my bike is a 2018 felt.
[00:49:02] Trevor Connor: Julie, do yourself a favor and say you land. Parallel to my camp. You don’t want to be in my camp.
[00:49:09] Julie Young: Okay. Parallel. Adjacent.
[00:49:12] Trevor Connor: Adjacent.
There you go. Adjacents better. Yeah.
[00:49:15] Julie Young: But anyway, it’s been interesting really to dive into this because honestly, like I’m so cynical and I think. Nothing matters, but it is really eyeopening to see how all this technology does add up. And I had kind of a fun conversation with Dr. Pruitt last night. It was a bike fitters therapy session, but he had talked about, I’m sure you guys have heard the story when he was working with Boin and he was trying to win the peri rube and he convinced him to take his bars from a 46 to a 42 and he like.
Gained 30 watts. It was crazy. So it was like, whoa, this stuff really matters. So for me as a cynical consumer, it’s been an eye-opener to dive into this subject.
[00:49:59] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I remember that Andy talking about that. And they were even talking about just the change in getting him to change his position to put his forearms down on the tops versus.
Being so upright and to think that wasn’t that long ago. Right. Or it doesn’t feel like it’s that long ago that they were saying, oh, bend your elbows. Mm-hmm. You’ll go faster. Is pretty remarkable.
[00:50:24] Chris Case: Yeah. Yeah. That was another episode of,
[00:50:29] Trevor Connor: I Gotta Queued Up
[00:50:29] Chris Case: Fast Talk. Yes, I do.
[00:50:31] Grant Holicky: Oh, are you reading it? You’re supposed to know it by now.
[00:50:34] Trevor Connor: He changed it recently.
[00:50:36] Grant Holicky: Yes. Was another episode of Fast Talk. I’ll do it in the radio voice. You ready? There we
[00:50:40] Trevor Connor: go.
[00:50:41] Chris Case: Give us your best. Phil Hartman. Hold on. I gotta put, yep. Put my Schumer
[00:50:43] Grant Holicky: glasses on.
[00:50:44] Chris Case: Chuma,
[00:50:45] Grant Holicky: that was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast.
Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like and subscribe there too and help us reach new audiences. As always, remember the thoughts and opinion expressed on Fast. Talks. Fast. Talks fast. Are those of Trevor. It’s falling apart. Chris. I was gonna say,
[00:51:08] Trevor Connor: and if you listen to my opinion
[00:51:11] Grant Holicky: and don’t on
[00:51:11] Trevor Connor: equipment, you’re gonna be very disappointed
[00:51:13] Grant Holicky: and do not take any of Trevor’s opinions seriously.
We love your feedback. Join the conversation@forums.fast talk labs.com or join us on social media at at Fast Talk Labs. For access to our endurance sports knowledge base. Knowledge base is one word. Continuing education for coaches as well as our in-person and remote athlete services. Head to fast talk labs.com.
For Trevor Connor, I’m Grant Hokey.
[00:51:40] Chris Case: What about us?
[00:51:41] Grant Holicky: I don’t really care about you guys. Thanks
[00:51:43] Trevor Connor: for listening. Now that everybody’s turned this off, I’m gonna state this. I might be rethinking my opinion on equipment.
[00:51:54] Grant Holicky: Yeah,
[00:51:55] Trevor Connor: you have it on record, but nobody heard that. Nobody turned it off.
Nobody
[00:51:57] Grant Holicky: heard. Nobody heard it.
Nobody heard it.
