devashish_paul wrote:
Yes, I am roughly alluding to this. When she is off the front and ITTing it is one thing, when there is company there is a different set of challenges at play. Lucy is also bullshitting that it costs her more energy to swim slower. She has no idea what she is talking about because Lucy would be the only swimmer in history for whom physics have an alternate reality. I "get" the perceived exertion can be lower riding high in the water at speed with high turnover vs sinking going slightly slower planing less, but the trade off is you're simply using less energy to swim slower....after all, water is a viscous medium.
While we have no idea if Lucy is over swimming, if you just take her swim splits at Kona and you take her Zwift wattages and you then take men who swim as fast as her in Kona and the wattages that they can put out, you start having a rough answer that the cost of her swim speed is not as low as she may claim (again there are some physics involved with swimming fast). She's not getting to T1 off low kilojoules during the swim and eventually those kilojoules come from one place and they have to be spread out over the bike and run.
Remember in 2019 when Jan saw Patrick Lange in the lead swim group in Kona. When he was interviewed he said something along the lines of, "I was happy to see Patrick in the lead swim group because I knew he would have over swam". As it turned out Patrick did not even get to Hawi due to sickness anyway, but Jan's point is solid. Its also why Lionel's bike at Challenge Daytona was so bad for her 51.3kph world hour recod relative to the field. Lionel should have smoked everyone on the bike in Daytona, but the swim took a bit out of him. Looks like in Miami he worked on swim and swam faster, but his bike was "just steady"....nothing out of the world.
Can't really compare her to a dude here. Inherently a pro male has the automatic ability to crank more watts than a pro female. That's just reality. So you would have to actually normalize both the swim time and the power data to compare her against a male pro.
Is she over-swimming? I don't think we've ever seen her truly go off the front and crush someone. Even at Kona. What she's still missing is the run when you consider the three disciplines, Daniela had the ability to get stung by a jelly fish, come into T1 in like 20th and then bike through the field, come into t2 in like 5th and then run through the field to take one.
Someone else mentioned coaching, basically Reece is learning everything based on how she performs and his knowledge base isn't the same as someone who's been coaching elites for 10-15 years. This is a valid criticism. But hey, she's still one of the most dominant triathletes of the current long course generation.
Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.