Rutgers Livingston Campus Circuit, Collegiate Men’s A - Peter Chiu - 3-9-09
I was recently thinking about sprinting. Should I focus on getting my cadence up to 8,000 rpm like a tricked out Civic with after market mods? Or should I turn my legs into pistons and produce 25,000 ft-lbs of torque (a quick google search revealed that some drilling rigs produce this much torque, and I don’t think they fit on a bike)? I checked out some of my old power files and looked at the peak cadence and the peak power, and it’s a little bit of both. It’s not about the peak cadence but the angular acceleration (going from 70 cadence to 130 lickity split) with a reasonable gear that produces the big wattage number. There may be a study coming out soon. Keep your eyes peeled.
What am I talking about, and what does this have to do with the Livingston Campus Circuit Race at Rutgers University? Well, it has everything to do with the race, because the race came down to a big time field sprint after 80 minutes of big ring throwdown action. After a very active early period with Columbia (my collegiate team) and UVM constantly sending riders up the road, a break finally stuck with David Wiswell (Mengoni/Columbia) and a UVM rider maintaining a 30 second lead. With a break up the road, the field settled into a decent rhythm, which was helped by the fact that Columbia and UVM massed on the front to jump on the big guns who were trying to bridge the gap. With 2 laps to go, the UVM rider was dropped and Wiswell put himself in the hurt box to stay away, but it was only a matter of time before he was reeled in. It’s sad, because you always want the brave soul in the break of the day to reap the benefits of the work, but that’s bike racing.
The attacks started coming and the dynamic nature of the peloton was pushing me back through the field constantly. Having learned from my mistake the day before, I put in a few big efforts to move up on the outside when the field was starting to become single file but not quite single file yet. As we’d catch the rider up the road, I’d avoid hitting the brakes and ride almost against the curb or just inside the yellow line to shoot up the field as the catch was made. This is a GREAT way to move up in a road race. Seriously. A side note. I don’t know if this is legal, but attacking on the sidewalk is classic Belgian racing. I’m going to leave it at that.
After a few late attacks, I found a group of my teammates. I looked over to Tony Hall (Luzzo’s/Columbia) and asked him twice if he was good. He had finished 3rd in the criterium the day before (from a late move) and 6th in the morning’s timetrial, so he was obviously in good shape. Beyond that, he has a lot of pop. When he didn’t respond, I figured that was a bad sign, so I slotted in behind Alex Bremer (Empire/Columbia) in 7th or 8th wheel as the final corner came. The field was already strung out single file as Nick Frey (Legacy Energy/Princeton) started the lead out for Nick Bennette (MetLife/Princeton) dropping him off with 200m to go. This was textbook and provides another learning point. As I understand it, the lead out is supposed to be so fast that nobody can move up reasonably without starting the sprint early. I yelled for Bremer to go, and he cracked open his sprint early to move me up a few places. After that, I just had to drop it into the biggest gear I had and spin my legs as fast as I could to fly by everyone else in this DOWNHILL sprint. I’m 140lbs. Gravity wasn’t exactly working in my favor. Coming around 4 or 5 people, I let out my war yelp and nabbed 2nd place! My first big result, and it was in a field with an inordinate number of Cat. 1s!
This is where the science at the beginning fits in. During the race, my chain was skipping, so I did a quick adjustment with a barrel adjuster and inadvertently restricted my gearing to a 13t cog on top. I’m not entirely sure that’s even the gear I was sprinting in (it might have even been the 53×14), but it IS clear that I wasn’t in the 53×12 for a downhill sprint against 1’s and 2’s. Accelerating my cadence in the biggest gear I could manage got me around 5 guys in the final 200m, and it wasn’t even the gear that most would expect. I’ve even been told I need an 11t cog for sprinting (ridiculous… I’m 140lbs… I probably would pedal squares backwards in an 11). Gear choice in a sprint is something that many people even in the upper categories get completely wrong, but it’s something that everyone can learn. This just cements in my mind the importance of using a gear that’s “sprintable,” which is sometimes smaller than the gear I want to use… Get out there and practice your sprints. You may surprise yourself!
Peter