Funny, my thoughts today were wow there is a guy who made it through the dope til you drop era without ever really stepping in shit. That and he that he seemed kind of swarmy.

Great explanation - thank you

A big part of it also effectively using who you have. I've always felt it's better to use your strongmen by increasing their pull duration. rather than using them to accelerate during their pulls. Because while riding at 34MPH is hard, accelerating from 32MPH to 35MPH is brutal, and can quickly rip a team to shreds - particularly when your 32MPH climbing waif is trying to catch back on right when your 35MPH diesel Freightliner dude is turning the boost dial to '11'. If you have a Tony Martin or a Van Garderen, use 'em for way more than 1/8 the time.

Just like in team pursuit, where if you have a Chloe Dygert, you send her out on some 1-1/2 lap pulls while her teammates do 1-lap. Or even 1/2-lap.

Here is 3min of power in a test run the guys did June 24th. They did this for about 20minutes. This was a training ride

So it start off at the front, around 500 watts. Then at 50:00, the lead rider peels off, and starts to fall back.
You then see a spike of 500 watts for a few seconds, just the effort to get back on the train. Sometimes if the front of the train accelerates, this becomes really hard and that's when you drop someone
The you can see the power at it's lowest at pos 6, then increasing at pos5, increase at 4...all the way back to position 1.
This was 7 guys in the train. Not 8.

This is exactly right and why it can be critical to know how your teammates ride. If you have a teammate who is a little "surgy," the worst thing you can do is to have your weakest rider in front of him? Why? Because when that surgy teammate ups the speed (which he shouldn't do), it's right at the most vulnerable time for the weak rider - right when he needs to make that power spike to get back on the back of the train.

If you're setting the right speed for the team, the stronger riders pull longer without accelerating the group, while the weaker riders pull shorter. If the weaker rider is at the limit, he should just swing off when he clears his wheel and not slow the pace. At some point he will either recover and will be able to gradually take small pulls, or he will be so gassed that he won't be able to latch back on when it's his turn to get back in the train.

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Amateur recreational hobbyist cyclist
https://www.strava.com/athletes/337152
https://vimeo.com/user11846099

LOL....your comment about the waif thin climbers and surgy big teammates reminds me of my TTT experience with one of our old teams. I was the waif thin climber and somehow always ended up in the order in front of the surgy big guy.....so my only hope was once I got to the front, I got to rest while leading and then as I dropped back I had to do my biggest surge to reattach just as surgy beefcake got to the front! Add in terrain variations and wind and super easy to blow the team apart with the wrong sequence wrong power to CDa vs power to weight and wrong personal riding characteristics. I can't wait to get home from work and watch the stage replay on my PVR!!!

Dev

Thanks this is awesome

don't you think he's covered in it, but somehow it gets overlooked - especially when those presenting on NBC are former team members. Think of a doper and most of them have a connection to Och. Then there are the financial connections to Verbruggen and Weissel. He either was a part of the doping culture, or best case knew what was going on and said nothing. The only other option is that he's an idiot - and i don't think that is the case.

Interesting that Team Sky has 3 or 4 different colored bikes in the TTT

British ITT Champ, Italian ITT Champ ,Colombia ITT champ, and Spanish Champ ITT. Those are the colours you are seeing in addition to the regular Sky Pinarello livery.

I was thinking something like that, thanks

I fell asleep 3 times during that stage!

They'll go well above VO2 effort - lots of efforts well over 600W whenever the guys are pulling. Example of a power distribution from today with times spent in zone:
- 0-56% FTP --> 21%
- 56-76% FTP --> 8%
- 76-91% FTP --> 9%
- 91-106% FTP --> 11%
-106-121% FTP --> 21%
- over 121% FTP --> 35%

That will fry your legs!!! It’s badass.
I’m going with the breakaway getting a win tomorrow and the peleton somewhat taking it easy.

This may be a good prediction....given by how Quickstep did today in terms of dropping their guy though, maybe they are ultra motivated to get Gavaria another stage....but they may be fried from the hammerfest today. Bummer they dropped Gavaria....if he could hang in, he would have been back in yellow!

I don't think they will be too fried from today's stage, after all it was only a 40 minute all out effort with a TSS of 70 +/- 5.... add the warmup and cooldown and it's around 120 for the day ... compared to their CTL it would be a rather average day. Also, not too many calories burned either giving plenty of opportunity to replenish energy and hydration today.

Sherwin said near the beginning of the telecast that the psi on their tires was 120 (this came pretty shortly after Jens was talking about the differences of TT bikes). I rewound the dvr to hear him say it again since I thought I misheard him. Not sure if he was talking about a particular team or the field in general, but can that be right? Is it only HED that recommends running no higher than ~90 given their rim design because 120 just sounded really high.

It was likely old information from back when this was the norm and tires were 20mm wide.

Sherwin and Liggett talk out of their ass all the time. You can take most of what they say with a grain of salt.

Oops. I was looking at the course profile of Stage 5 when I made my prediction. My bad. 4 is flat and a complete sprint stage. No wonder I was confused why people were picking the sprinters. Lol
No way a sprinter is winning stage 5 though!