Rotorcranks impressions:
1st ride, January 27, 2004:
I did an indoor workout with the RC’s last night. My very first impression was that my pedal stroke had become somewhat ovalized. This impression lasted just a few minutes and after a warmup, it felt relatively normal. One-legged pedaling, of course, felt normal, since there was no offset effect to be had while using only one crank.
The bulk of the workout was low-cadence (60-65 RPM), high resistance pedaling sets of 10 minutes, with a couple of accelerations to 100 RPM. The main thing that I noticed was that I seemed to be able to use a very big gear (53x13) with a lower than usual heart rate (I had trouble getting the HR into the 160-170 range at low cadence; at high cadence, no problem).
I had a great workout, and the weird sensation largely went away during the latter half. I felt…smoother, like (as my coach would say) I was wrapping the chain around the big chain ring.
Muscularly speaking, I felt my legs a bit more during the ride, just in a slightly different distribution (hard to explain) but it did not keep me from working hard. As a write this at 6:30 am, the morning after, I have no appreciable muscle soreness. I will be doing rollers later for 1.5-2 hours today, and I am looking forward to seeing if I am smoother or not, as this is very evident on rollers.
As an aside, at first, my mechanic was very skeptical about RC’s. As he started to read up on them, he got increasingly into the installation process, and now is excited to see if they work.
David R. Albert, CSCS
wpt@videotron.ca
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1st ride, January 27, 2004:
I did an indoor workout with the RC’s last night. My very first impression was that my pedal stroke had become somewhat ovalized. This impression lasted just a few minutes and after a warmup, it felt relatively normal. One-legged pedaling, of course, felt normal, since there was no offset effect to be had while using only one crank.
The bulk of the workout was low-cadence (60-65 RPM), high resistance pedaling sets of 10 minutes, with a couple of accelerations to 100 RPM. The main thing that I noticed was that I seemed to be able to use a very big gear (53x13) with a lower than usual heart rate (I had trouble getting the HR into the 160-170 range at low cadence; at high cadence, no problem).
I had a great workout, and the weird sensation largely went away during the latter half. I felt…smoother, like (as my coach would say) I was wrapping the chain around the big chain ring.
Muscularly speaking, I felt my legs a bit more during the ride, just in a slightly different distribution (hard to explain) but it did not keep me from working hard. As a write this at 6:30 am, the morning after, I have no appreciable muscle soreness. I will be doing rollers later for 1.5-2 hours today, and I am looking forward to seeing if I am smoother or not, as this is very evident on rollers.
As an aside, at first, my mechanic was very skeptical about RC’s. As he started to read up on them, he got increasingly into the installation process, and now is excited to see if they work.
David R. Albert, CSCS
wpt@videotron.ca
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