Ai_1 wrote:
Tri Bread wrote:
Ai_1 wrote:
Based on altitude gain alone I'd expect it's slightly faster than it was. I'm pretty sure I remember it being a bit over 1600m of altitude gain when I did it. The second half of the new route is the same profile as the old one so the first half must be a bit flatter.
I'd have preferred a single loop route myself. I don't like laps for a long race.
I've never done it, but have heard that it was a very fast bike course before, if now faster and 1 loop, it has jumped on the to-do list.
It wouldn't have been as fast as a much flatter course, but as the descents were mostly gradual, you could make use of the potential energy gained while climbing and recover
some of the time lost on the climbs. If the new portion of this single loop route is shallow climbs and steep descents, the opposite will be the case and it may be slower despite the slightly reduced altitude gain. Personally I'm not especially interested in how fast the course is. if you want easy, do an olympic ;)
At the same time what we see all the time is that flatter courses with smaller fields are not really much faster than austria and roth if they are the full 180 k ( many flat course tend to be windy as well) . since most people dont have a bike set up good enough to take advantage of a flat course on their own .
the main reason why flat courses are faster is that packs stay more togheter and people can sit up with less time penalty while saving energy. and we see much more imprpvement of Mopers than the real fopers that cycle on its own, on flat course .
we all know people that have nowhere near the abilty to go sub 5. to go sub 5 on courses barcelona...
or we have seen it time and time again in the early 70,3 world champs in flodida where age group female constantly outsplit female pros cyclingin male packs.