"Experts"
 

Remember when we all knew 700x20 tires at 130 psi was the fastest? Apparently now we aren't even sure if 35's are any slower than 28's.

Remember all those amazing theories about crank length being a percentage of leg length yielding 200mm plus cranks for tall people? Nope, everyone on 165's now.

Knee over center of axle?
axle centered under ball of foot?
easy gears are for unfit amateurs?
Wide rims are for mountain bikes?
hookless are better than hooked rims?
Lightweight bikes make you go faster ?
etc, etc, etc

So, how much of current trendy cycling expertise is also BS?

I hate BS.

I have devoted my whole life to hone my BS detector so I can smoke them out at first sight.

But still, I am not so naive to call everything BS.

The heart of the problem is, there are assumptions, caveats, exceptions being applied in making a claim, any claim!

If one is not aware of those fine print and just apply whatever is being told to them wholesale without any modification or discerning thought, that's when the issue arises. When that happens, we jump to conclusion too quickly and call it BS.

Nope, it's not BS, it's just partially true or correct.

The best answer is still: it depends. :D

I rely on experience more than anything else.

I know what tires work best for me, I know how to fit myself on a bike, and i know how much more i like low gears getting up a hill rather than grinding a big gear.

The good news for me is nobody is paying me to ride a bike, or to be fast or win races (that would be wasted money!), so I don't feel compelled to listen to experts, I just do what I like.

It kind of feels like some of these trends are way out on a precipice right now and recommendations are extreme right now.

So maybe lots of BS right now too.

Also I think we are quite often to accept the new BS cause it's different than the old BS and it provides a justification to buy something new and shiny.

Pretty sure I never thought 120psi was ever a good idea and I'm not sure I could have even run 20c tires without being out of the tire pressure limits.

Not all of those are BS, strictly speaking. Some of them are over-simplifications, mis-understandings, or simply what the best available evidence tells us.

Our understanding of things is constantly evolving and changing. Largely this happens as new evidence become available. What we know to the best of our knowldge today may be different than it was yesterday, and may be different from what it will be tomorrow. But that doesn't mean that it is strictly BS.

When I was in school, we were told that the dinosaurs were extinct and that Pluto was a planet. Now we are told that not all dinosaurs are extinct and that Pluto is not a planet.. Were we just being told BS back then?

Well, your statement that everyone is on 165s now is BS. :no: But maybe it's not trendy. :p

I don't know what I'll be doing differently in 10-20 years. I do think that we have much better performance metrics than we did in the past, so in general cycling trends are now much more likely to be "actually fast" whereas in the past they were more likely to be "feels fast."

But there are also a lot of situations where one type of equipment is faster in one environment than another, but the race is a mix of environments. The decisions people make may genuinely depend on the choices of other people. As an example, in a road race, a heavier aero bike might be faster than a lightweight climbing bike if you were to ride the course solo. But if everyone else is on lightweight climbing bikes, and you choose an aero bike, you could get dropped on the climb and lose the draft making you slower overall.

On top of that, there are also areas where technological development in one area opens up new developments in another area. Wide range 1x drivetrains have made new suspension designs viable that weren't before. Dropper posts have made geometries viable that weren't before.

Surely there's a lot of "fashion" to the cycling industry, and things change slowly over time, but it's also true that designing and developing new products is costly, and may not always be successful, so it may take a lot time to transition to new technological trends that could be considered objectively better.

But that's all abstract. If I am going to call out one thing, it's that teams/bikes should actually go much further on the wider tires and suspension thing, BUT with a big caveat. In the past, that's always been focused on the leaders, but the leaders are the ones who are worried about surviving onto the velodrome. My take is that for Paris Roubaix, it's the scrubs of the peloton who should be on 45mm tires with short travel bikes. Those are the guys who are unlikely to every make it to the velodrome with the lead group, but they are likely to get dropped on the cobbles. But TdF tech always seems to flow from the leaders down. I think that one is a mistake. Van der Poel can ride the cobbles fine on anything, but the half the peloton who are likely to DNF could use some more help.

There's so much stuff where we take really really precise recommendations for granted but then in the real world most of us have very little ability to repeatably actually do things accurately.

Things as simple as setting your saddle height and setback correctly assuming you actually have #s are actually challenging at home.

[QUOTE=AngryScientist;3368583]I rely on experience more than anything else.

I know what tires work best for me, I know how to fit myself on a bike, and i know how much more i like low gears getting up a hill rather than grinding a big gear.

The good news for me is nobody is paying me to ride a bike, or to be fast or win races (that would be wasted money!), so I don't feel compelled to listen to experts, I just do what I like.

Bicycletricycle,

You make some very good points. What was true 20 years ago, is no longer. But, how do we know that what we accept now as being true will be in 20 more years? Maybe it will be back to the old truths, or something else completely - If so, what does that say about truth? Is truth fluid?

About cycling, I like what Nick said here, and I pretty much go with that also.

Dave

I ride 165's

My experience is that size 41.5 shoes are the optimal shoe size.

Lots of pros used to slam their saddles back and now many slam them forward.

Truth is a big word . The main problem seems to be that we just aren’t as smart as we think we are. Truth is mostly out of reach.

Seems like we can know some things for sure about cycling though.

1. Simple facts , how much things weigh, dimensions, rigidity, material attributes , who won the race, etc. These things are interesting to know but don’t always mean much about the actual activity of cycling.

2. Our own experience- we can know how we feel about cycling , this is probably the most important thing we can know about cycling.

Everything else seems to get a bit too complicated though. When we ask more complex questions about cycling we run into a lot of snags. Examples.

What is a riders ideal crank length?
How stiff should a bicycle be?
What is the best material for a fork?
Are 1x drivetrains better than 2x ?
What causes bicycle shimmy?
Best place to put load on a bicycle?
Are recumbents better than uprights?
Wool or synthetic?
Ideal width of tire for riding on smooth roads?
Ideal pedaling RPM?

Absolute answers to these seem out of reach for a whole variety of reasons. Certainly we can know some things about all this stuff, even come up with some pretty useful conclusions. 50 years from now our answers may all seem kinda stupid though.

For me the lesson is just that we should all take it easy, especially the experts. None of us know as much as we would like to think we do.






[QUOTE=dcama5;3368594]

When I bought the Open last year, I converted my disc Boyd Altamont wheels from QR to TA. The Altamont wheels were my "road" wheels for the gravel bike. The gravel wheels are XMR hubs with QR, and WTB I-23 rims. I looked around the internet for QR disc wheels and the pickings are slim. The best option besides custom looks like Boyd. Thru axles have assimilated the wheel world.

I still have the QR caps for the Boyd hubs along with a HG freehub.

I'm an expert on this as well so let me chip in:

Bikes with integrated cables are dramatically faster than bikes with exposed cables. Also maintenance is much easier on those than exposed cables. I learned it from bike manufacturers' website so it must be true. Again, I'm an expert on this.