DFW_Tri wrote:
Ok, help me understand the charts. I didn’t need an article to understand that rougher roads slow us down. But, I can’t figure out from those charts what is the ideal PSI for each road surface. I think we can all fairly safely ignore the roughest surface. We might encounter that briefly on a ride but that ground up stuff is really only found when a road is under construction. So for asphalt (or smoothish roads), we should do what? For , chip seal, we should do what?
There is no one size fits all here, but let's say for the sake of explanation that:
-You are the exact weight of the rider in testing (I think someone said that was 190lbs, or maybe that was rider+bike?)
-You know the entire course is the exact same pavement conditions as tested
-You are running the exact same tires and tubes
Now of course this is pretty much impossible, but if this was true you would want to use the pressure at the bottom vertex of the graph. So for brand new asphalt, 110psi; coarse, 100psi.
The reality is that you will never know the exact asphalt conditions and if you're running 10 psi too high you are going to lose way more than if you run 10psi too low. This is shown by the slope of the curve on either side of this break point. So in reality, assuming a mix between the brand new and coarse asphalt, you want to always be on the low pressure side of the break point. So maybe 90psi. Now this is for a heavier rider and there is very little risk to running it even lower, with the added benefit of comfort, so maybe scoot left another 5-10psi. There really are too many variables to base all your decisions off one graph but the biggest takeaway is to go less than what would be "ideal" for those conditions, because as soon as those conditions become worse than what you thought they were, you're losing out big time.
Benjamin Deal - Professional - Instagram - TriRig - Lodi Cyclery
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