In Reply To:
finally, you emphasize variances in people. i emphasize sameness. why do i do this? because sameness wins in every other human endeavor. every one. except, perhaps, fine art. when somebody breaks from the mold, sameness just coalesces around him. when bill koch started skating every XC race, his competitors didn't simply say, "well, there goes an outlier." bill koch's outlier-ness became the next generation's sameness.
so we're haggling, you and me, over two issues: whether sameness trumps deviation; and if it does, what is the risk/benefit slope as you deviate from the norm? i don't think we're going to solve it here, but i think your message to these readers is, for these readers, the perilous one.
I don't emphasize variance in people but I do think that even though we are more or less the same there are individual differences. I mean just take a look around next time you're in a big crowd and it's pretty obvious that some people are very different..
Seriously though, in this context it could be body type, muscle fiber composition, femur lenght etc varying between people that I do think can easily account for a difference in cadece of 5-10rpm up and down. Iow I don't think we are so similar that we can, in this case, say that everyones ideal cadence should be almost exactly the same.
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