AJA #46: Safety Pins, TPU Wins & Indoor Suffering
00:23 – Why don’t teams print race numbers on jerseys?
17:37 – Seat-bag optimization: Josh’s microfiber anti-rattle setup
19:48 – Sweat science: does a jersey help cooling indoors?
24:20 – Fatty’s indoor-training hacks: bibs, fans, mats & brake wedges
27:28 – Hottie’s 32er test ride & who 32ers are really for
33:38 – Everyday riders’ marginal gains: tires, tubes, comfort & cleanliness
41:06 – Josh vs. the UCI 10-tooth ban
00:00:04 Hottie
This is the Marginal Gains Podcast, the show that makes a big deal about the little things and how those little things can be a big deal.
00:00:11 Hottie
This is an Ask Josh Anything episode.
00:00:13 Hottie
So let's get straight to a question here.
00:00:15 Hottie
Here's a question that feels deceptively obvious, Josh, marginal gains listener calling in on the marginal gains hotline.
00:00:22 Hottie
Let's hear it.
00:00:23 Caller
Hello, this is Dave from Massachusetts.
00:00:25 Caller
I'm just wondering why teams don't print
00:00:28 Caller
race numbers on their jerseys.
00:00:30 Caller
That seems like a no-brainer.
00:00:31 Hottie
Yeah, I think he's getting into the aerodynamics of this.
00:00:33 Hottie
Josh, you and I on the show, we've talked a lot about how much we can't stand the track and field athletes and their floppy numbers out front.
00:00:40 Hottie
And, you know, cyclists are better at this.
00:00:42 Hottie
I mean, they work at pinning them on, but why are they not taking the next step and just printing their number on the jerseys?
00:00:48 Josh
The simplest answer is because they're not allowed to.
00:00:51 Josh
Yeah, that is a thing in the rules that are controlled by, to some extent, the UCI, but really
00:00:58 Josh
governing bodies like the ASO, they're making good money selling sponsorship in most cases to some company to be on that race number.
00:01:07 Josh
And then also, they use the numbering in a lot of races to like have a meeting, right?
00:01:15 Josh
So like at the Tour de France,
00:01:17 Josh
whoever won last year gets #1, and then the rest of their team would all get, numbers beginning with one, right?
00:01:26 Josh
Or the single-digit numbers.
00:01:28 Josh
The person, finished second is A2, and then, all of the numbers in the 20s,
00:01:34 Josh
and so on.
00:01:35 Josh
And so, it changes up race by race.
00:01:39 Josh
if you're at the Dolphine, if you won the Dolphine last year, you'd be #1.
00:01:44 Josh
But if you, finished 8th at the tour, you would be number 81 at the tour that year.
00:01:51 Josh
And so it would put the teams in a spot where they would essentially have to print new jerseys and skin suits for each rider for each race.
00:02:01 Josh
which, certainly isn't cost-effective.
00:02:03 Josh
But the big one being that I think some of the top teams would certainly do it or consider it for the skin suits and the time trial suits if they were allowed to do it, but they absolutely aren't.
00:02:17 Josh
If you remember back to like the 80s, there were even roles like everybody, like Coca-Cola sponsored the tour.
00:02:25 Josh
And so every rider could only ride red Coca-Cola water bottles.
00:02:31 Josh
as a rule to the race.
00:02:32 Josh
And there have been other things like that over the years.
00:02:34 Josh
So I will say the one that came and went, the ASO for a number of years, I actually have a handful of these at home that riders had given me, they had adhesive backed numbers.
00:02:47 Josh
And so, you see, to this day, I mean, you'll see like, Wout Van Art is sitting in the team bus listening to the
00:02:54 Josh
briefing for the day and he's, pinning his number on with little safety pins.
00:02:59 Josh
They're like, Jesus, how are we still here?
00:03:03 Josh
10, 15 years ago, they were adhesive backed and you would peel them and stick them.
00:03:08 Josh
And I think partly they, those were expensive and there was some complaining from the teams that sometimes the adhesive would stay with the jersey and then would cause a problem in the laundry.
00:03:21 Josh
or cause, you'd have to, get some adhesive remover and work it out or something like that.
00:03:27 Josh
So, those sadly have gone away and we're somehow back to safety pins.
00:03:33 Josh
But I'm 100% with you.
00:03:34 Josh
That's something I look at every time I'm there, every time I see it on TV and think, seriously, like for all the technology we've developed over the last however long, we are still at safety pins.
00:03:47 Hottie
Some of us masters racers here in Southern California, we would actually buy that canned spray adhesive stuff and spray that on our numbers and then tack that onto our jerseys to avoid just doing the whole pin thing.
00:04:00 Hottie
Like I'm A7 pin guy.
00:04:01 Hottie
I put 7 pins in each number that I'm given, you know, which is a lot, especially when you're nervous before a crit race.
00:04:08 Hottie
But the same problem with that spray on adhesive, like it would leave all kinds of goo all over your jersey.
00:04:13 Hottie
Like, well, and when you're forking out for the jerseys,
00:04:15 Hottie
No good.
00:04:16 Hottie
But do you think there'd be a measurable difference, aerodynamic difference, if they were to go from pin-on numbers to something permanent on the jersey?
00:04:25 Fatty
Or something screened on.
00:04:26 Josh
Oh, totally.
00:04:28 Josh
Yeah.
00:04:28 Josh
I mean, there's, I can't off the top of my head think of the name.
00:04:31 Josh
It's not Zav's company, but there's a skin suit company in the UK that actually has a clear pouch in the back that the number can go in.
00:04:39 Josh
It's like the, it's like the clears, the clear pouch on the UPS label, you know, on your package.
00:04:46 Josh
And so that, and that's built into the skin suit, like ultrasonically welded in so that you can have a perfectly smooth and flush.
00:04:53 Josh
And I think, I'd have to look it up, but I want to think that got either banned or disallowed in some races.
00:05:03 Josh
We'll have to look that up for a future episode since we do these kind of unscripted.
00:05:09 Josh
But I think that might have even been banned.
00:05:11 Josh
And I wouldn't, that's a reason.
00:05:12 Josh
I know they banned like trimming the numbers, making them smaller.
00:05:16 Josh
Any sort of cutting is banned, which again, I think is stupid, but they, somebody's paying a lot of money to put their name on that number.
00:05:25 Josh
Flip side of this, like when I was racing in Europe back in the day, and then I think guys have been, if you've raced Kermies in Belgium or France or any of that,
00:05:35 Josh
Remember, there were numbers that were leather, like branded leather.
00:05:41 Josh
And the numbers were 25 years old by the time you got it, right?
00:05:45 Josh
And so the race owned its own stack of leather numbers.
00:05:49 Josh
And.
00:05:50 Fatty
They got a story at that point.
00:05:53 Josh
Oh God, yeah.
00:05:53 Josh
And they, and the real shame of that, because the weather's terrible and rainy and all that is those then ruin your kit because you're riding in the rain for like 7 hours with it on and you get it off and now you've got like a sort of a discolored brown spot where it was.
00:06:08 Josh
And if you were lucky, it would wash out.
00:06:11 Josh
And if you weren't lucky, it wouldn't.
00:06:13 Josh
So yeah, I think that.
00:06:15 Josh
There's a whole generation of team clothing out there with, a kind of weird brown zone from, having 50 numbers over the course of a season stuck in that spot.
00:06:27 Hottie
Yeah, it'd be hard for the, I think, cycling.
00:06:30 Hottie
It's so, you know, steeped in tradition, right?
00:06:33 Hottie
I mean, it's part of the tradition to the sport, I suppose, that pinning on a number is kind of the right of
00:06:39 Hottie
entering a race, like you got to be able to depend on your number.
00:06:41 Hottie
Okay.
00:06:42 Hottie
Now, at the highest level, do they still need to do it?
00:06:44 Hottie
I mean, they could just assign numbers to racers and they would just wear them throughout the year, like baseball and football bat, like other sports.
00:06:52 Fatty
Give every racer a unique QR code.
00:06:54 Hottie
Right.
00:06:55 Hottie
There you go.
00:06:59 Fatty
Get it tattooed onto your calf and you've got it forever.
00:07:02 Fatty
Just imagine.
00:07:04 Fatty
I mean, everyone's putting the Iron Man thing on their calfs.
00:07:07 Fatty
Why not a QR code?
00:07:08 Hottie
Hey, the Barnes and Rains podcast is presented by Silka.
00:07:11 Hottie
We're going to talk to Josh about TPU tubes in a few minutes.
00:07:15 Hottie
Silka has entered the tube market.
00:07:18 Hottie
No surprise, they are called the TPU Ultimate.
00:07:22 Hottie
This show also supported by Shimano.
00:07:25 Hottie
A couple episodes ago, we told you about Shimano's new mountain bike cleats.
00:07:29 Hottie
with their fully or multi-entry feature, toe first, heel first, or stomp straight down.
00:07:34 Hottie
Shimano also has a new system that increases the pedaling platform of its venerable SPD off-road cleat.
00:07:41 Hottie
It's called pontoon.
00:07:43 Hottie
The system is designed to create more contact area with the pedal.
00:07:47 Hottie
The pontoons, little platforms on either side of the cleat, replace the shoe tread that normally sits on either side of the cleat.
00:07:55 Hottie
So yes,
00:07:56 Hottie
That means unless you have a shoe with removable treads or you're willing to carve out the tread on one of your molded shoes, the pontoon cleat needs to be paired with Shimano's new S-Fire gravel shoe.
00:08:09 Hottie
For a better understanding of how the system works, check out the new Shimano gravel shoes and this innovative cleat system by going to bike.shimano.com.
00:08:19 Hottie
I'm Michael Hotton, hotter to most.
00:08:21 Fatty
We're 20 minutes into this episode and I am fatty.
00:08:25 Fatty
if you guys, I feel sorry for the folks who are joining this episode of the podcast who are not here for the 40 minutes we talked before we started recording.
00:08:36 Fatty
We're halfway into the episode, guys.
00:08:38 Fatty
It would not be an Ask Josh Anything episode anymore if we weren't asking Josh about a new Silica product.
00:08:46 Fatty
And Hadi just referred to this Ultimate TP YouTube.
00:08:49 Fatty
Josh, on the product launch video, you say one reason Silka decided to take on the TPU market was because your wife had a couple of flats, seven days apart, and she was using a well-known TPU tube.
00:09:04 Fatty
I'm not sure why we are stepping around the brand, but I'm happy to go with that.
00:09:09 Fatty
This resulted in what I can assume was a very
00:09:14 Fatty
entertaining phone call and ride home and intervals at home.
00:09:22 Fatty
We have the ultimate TPU tube as a result of it.
00:09:26 Fatty
Metal valve stem that is clamped, not glued to the tube.
00:09:31 Fatty
You boldly say, Josh, that this tube is not going to fail.
00:09:35 Fatty
And one thing that stands out in this tube is that it is translucent as opposed to hunter orange or some other color.
00:09:44 Fatty
So what are the marginal gains of going colorless?
00:09:46 Josh
Oh, yeah.
00:09:47 Josh
So I think I actually told this story in a, like a far ago episode of the show.
00:09:53 Josh
But yeah, so I put TPU tubes, the bright orange ones, in my entire family's e-bikes.
00:10:00 Josh
In everything.
00:10:00 Josh
In everything.
00:10:01 Fatty
Yeah.
00:10:01 Josh
And in my wife's bike, so she works at a hospital.
00:10:03 Josh
She's got to take her bike up like 6 stairs to block it.
00:10:07 Josh
You know, her e-bike weighs like 48 pounds or something.
00:10:10 Josh
And it came with these Schwalbe City tires, which are great tires, but it came with these Schwalbe inner tubes that were like almost 600 grams each.
00:10:20 Josh
And so I thought, oh man, I can put TPU in there and save a pound per tire.
00:10:24 Josh
I mean, 2 pounds, that's not nothing.
00:10:27 Josh
And they, you know, they supposedly rolled faster and all that stuff.
00:10:30 Josh
What I did not know was that those have the plastic bonded
00:10:36 Josh
valve stem base and that in time from the friction and rolling that the inside of the valve hole of the rim would just cut a circle into the tube, causing it to flat itself at random.
00:10:49 Josh
And so yeah, over a couple of months, my entire family got like had flats somewhere or another.
00:10:56 Josh
I mean, sometimes I think my son, he was rolling out to go to school and he walked out to the garage and flat tire.
00:11:03 Josh
That's a whole lot better than both times for my wife.
00:11:06 Josh
She came out of work to a flat tire at like 6.30 at night and she's wearing her scrubs and she's ready to go and it's getting dark and it's a 35, 40 minute ride home.
00:11:17 Josh
Both times a phone call.
00:11:18 Josh
So the second time me tailed between my legs like never again.
00:11:24 Josh
So we started, how do you make this better?
00:11:26 Josh
And the thing for me was like, why doesn't a TPU tube just have a tubeless valve in it?
00:11:32 Josh
Like
00:11:33 Josh
And so we just, you take a tubeless valve, essentially, you make a custom geometry at the bottom, you thread down a custom nut, you sandwich the TPU at the base of the valve, and then with a little rubber disc, you have that to touch the rim, right, in the hole, cut into the rim.
00:11:52 Josh
And the TPU is nowhere near that.
00:11:54 Josh
So that was like problem solved.
00:11:56 Josh
And then you thread that stem and you put a nut on the top.
00:11:59 Josh
Because the other thing that fails these is, you know, from
00:12:02 Josh
installing and removing a pump, there's a lot of force.
00:12:06 Josh
And we certainly have seen, there's a lot of interest in click valve and the click valve works great, but it's actually a much higher force to both install and remove than normal Presta.
00:12:14 Josh
And so those things, if you have a TPU tube that can take a replacement valve core and you put a click valve in it, I mean, it's like a week and that thing is smoked.
00:12:25 Josh
And so we're watching this, talking to bike shops here.
00:12:28 Josh
And so we've, you know, as I do, fell in the rabbit hole.
00:12:31 Josh
This tech was invented in Germany and found a guy who worked at this company who I'd actually known from years prior at Vittoria back in the like Cervelo test team days.
00:12:43 Josh
And so we just started talking it through.
00:12:45 Josh
And that was one of the things he had brought up is this coloration.
00:12:49 Josh
Like, oh, you know, if you want higher elongation, it has to be clear, but most people want color.
00:12:54 Josh
I'm like, you know, that makes sense.
00:12:56 Josh
I mean, anybody who's ever broken stuff made from plastic or worked with plastics
00:13:01 Josh
any sort of injection molding, like it changes the shrinkage, it changes the ultimate strength of the product, it changes the elongation at failure, because different colors are, they affect the structure, right?
00:13:13 Josh
You're putting, you're putting something into this thing that maybe wasn't, doesn't want that stuff to be there, right?
00:13:21 Josh
And so, you know, I think the easiest way to think of it is, you know, like pink is, pink is not structural TPU and orange is not a structural TPU.
00:13:30 Josh
But when you add it to structural TPU, you're diluting.
00:13:35 Josh
So that was their thing.
00:13:35 Josh
Hey, and then of course was, oh, and if you don't color it, we can radio frequency weld the tube instead of bonding it, which is the other common failure point, right?
00:13:46 Josh
So I think so many of these tubes, they're slip bonded at the one end.
00:13:50 Josh
And it's like, we say, if you've ever done gutter work,
00:13:52 Josh
how you have to take like, you got two of the same size things, the one isn't going to fit in the other.
00:13:57 Josh
And so you have to kind of crimp it to undersize it a little bit and then jam it in there.
00:14:01 Josh
But then you end up with a wrinkle.
00:14:03 Josh
And in that design, you're now relying on glue, which isn't meant, you know, glue isn't meant to be structural or thick.
00:14:12 Josh
It's just meant to be surface to surface.
00:14:14 Josh
You're relying on glue to fill this void and then essentially
00:14:18 Josh
destructural in the tube.
00:14:19 Josh
And so a lot of them fail there.
00:14:21 Josh
So we developed a method with this company to do this RF welding.
00:14:26 Josh
And yeah, it works pretty darn well.
00:14:28 Josh
And it allows, if you notice, our tubes have a broader range of size fitment.
00:14:36 Josh
per size.
00:14:36 Josh
So instead of three or four sizes, we're covering the whole range from I think 25, 26 millimeters all the way up to 55 millimeters with just two tubes because we can take advantage of the entire elongation of the material and we're not constrained by having a lower elongation due to adding color.
00:14:56 Josh
In an item that quite frankly, once it's installed, you'll never see the color.
00:15:03 Hottie
Is translucent faster and lighter?
00:15:08 Josh
So it's not lighter, but it's faster.
00:15:11 Josh
Yeah.
00:15:11 Josh
So because the, a lot of these colors or these pigments, some of them are, come from, some of them are plastics, some of them are, still it's kind of crazy.
00:15:22 Josh
Some of them come from, rocks.
00:15:24 Josh
Some of them come from other things in nature.
00:15:28 Josh
You know, they're getting,
00:15:30 Josh
Essentially, in amongst the molecules of the TPU and kind of breaking things, they're breaking it up, right?
00:15:38 Josh
I mean, it's a little, as a mental model, I think it's a little bit similar to the, you know, when you put your factory grease chain into wax and it softens the wax because all those grease, the oil molecules are getting in between the wax molecules, so they can't stay together as effectively.
00:15:55 Josh
So, I mean, the translucent allows it to be a little bit faster because the hysteresis is lower, because the molecular structure is more pure.
00:16:04 Josh
And then because the elongation is higher and the ultimate strength is higher, you can have the tube either be stronger at the same thickness or as strong at a slightly thinner thickness.
00:16:18 Josh
than it otherwise would be.
00:16:20 Josh
And of course, slightly thinner is slightly less material for the hysteresis.
00:16:26 Josh
it just compounds on itself.
00:16:28 Josh
So yes, we are almost, and within about 0.2, 0.3 watts of the efficiency of a latex tube with these TPU tubes, where traditionally,
00:16:39 Josh
The TPU tubes are probably somewhere in that 1 to 1 1/2 watts slower than, so they're better than butyl, but 1 to 1 1/2 watts slower than latex.
00:16:50 Josh
And we're right up on latex.
00:16:53 Josh
But we are also still able to now be at about 1/3 the weight of latex.
00:16:58 Josh
So it's a pretty good combination.
00:17:00 Josh
Really, the only negative to this product is that it's not cheap.
00:17:07 Josh
You know, it's like $39, which is in line for
00:17:09 Josh
A lot of TPU tubes are actually cheaper than a number of the European brands out there for a product that's actually made in Germany at the factory that invented the tech.
00:17:20 Josh
But yeah, it's $39 for a tube.
00:17:22 Josh
So, you know, it's like a lot of things in cycling.
00:17:24 Josh
Like you can solve all the problems with a little bit of money, but for some people, you know, we do have people like, oh, I'd never spend more than $10 on a tube.
00:17:34 Josh
Like, well, then it's not for you.
00:17:37 Fatty
So I'm going to do a little bit of customer support with Josh right now.
00:17:41 Fatty
So I have a Matone.
00:17:42 Fatty
I have an Electrico Micro in that Matone.
00:17:45 Fatty
I currently have that in a baggie.
00:17:48 Fatty
And then I'll be getting these TPU tubes and I'll be putting them in another baggie, I guess, to go in the Matone.
00:17:56 Fatty
How do you set things up so that you don't have nested bags 20 levels deep?
00:18:02 Josh
Yeah, so you definitely want the bag for your micro since it's not.
00:18:06 Josh
waterproof, waterproof.
00:18:08 Josh
And, your Mattone's water resistant, but not waterproof.
00:18:12 Josh
I wrap my tubes in a microfiber towel.
00:18:17 Josh
And the other thing I do is then on top, I put one of the Silca gear wipe singles.
00:18:24 Josh
And so that way, when you're done doing whatever you have to do, you essentially have a wet wipe and a dry wipe to take care of, you know, your hands or
00:18:33 Josh
your bike or whatever it is that those gear wipes are, I mean, you can darn near, clean your bike with one gear wipe.
00:18:41 Josh
They're incredibly effective on cleaning your hands if they're dirty.
00:18:45 Josh
And then if you're not too dirty, your microfiber towel is great for everything else.
00:18:49 Josh
But I also like the microfiber towel because it's fluffy and squishy and it compresses nicely and keeps everything quiet because there is nothing worse than a rattle in your seat bag.
00:19:03 Josh
And so, it's sort of, serves multiple things, but probably the most important for the all the time that you're riding is it's just a sound damping cushion, keeping rattles out of your seat back.
00:19:18 Fatty
Fantastic.
00:19:18 Fatty
I'm probably going to cut one of those microfiber towels down to half or quarter length.
00:19:23 Fatty
You know, I don't think I'm needing the whole one in there, but that sounds great.
00:19:28 Fatty
But on the bike that I'm going to be using for this winter,
00:19:32 Fatty
in the basement.
00:19:33 Fatty
I don't need any CPAC at all.
00:19:35 Fatty
We're getting close to indoor training season.
00:19:38 Fatty
And the questions we're getting in are starting to reflect that.
00:19:41 Fatty
Dave from Massachusetts called into the marginal gains hotline, 317-343-4506.
00:19:48 Fatty
Here's a question he's got.
00:19:49 Caller
Hi, this is Dave from Massachusetts.
00:19:51 Caller
I'm wondering if sweat evaporation cooling is more efficient during indoor training with or without
00:20:00 Caller
A jersey on your shirt.
00:20:02 Caller
Thank you.
00:20:02 Josh
I honestly do not know the answer, and I think this is one that we should probably go and check.
00:20:07 Josh
I'll say I've seen it, or I have heard it both ways from clothing companies, but I'd love, this would be a good one for Alan Lim, or trying to think of who else we could put this in front of.
00:20:19 Josh
The argument for the clothing companies is that a very tight,
00:20:26 Josh
base layer will help spread, kind of wick away from the skin to the outside, outer surface and will help kind of, laterally move because you're not, you're not sweating equally everywhere.
00:20:38 Josh
So will help kind of move the sweat around the garment in a way that it can better evaporate, keeping your skin dry.
00:20:46 Josh
I will say I just always feel like a wet blanket in one of those.
00:20:53 Josh
And so I ride indoors with nothing and just a couple of powerful fans and let it blow away.
00:21:00 Josh
Partly feel like, if the big bead of sweat is blowing across the room, then it doesn't have to evaporate.
00:21:06 Josh
It's just somewhere else, which of course has its own other, its own other issues.
00:21:12 Josh
But as far as, yeah, like are there studies that have been done or anything?
00:21:17 Josh
I, you know, I want to look into that and we'll come back at it because I,
00:21:21 Josh
I understand the arguments, but I have not seen a definitive study or anything on that I can dig into my brain to quote from to tell you.
00:21:33 Hottie
Here's David in Florida who also texted into the marginal against hotline 317-343-4506 with this question.
00:21:40 Hottie
He says, I'm not sure if this has been addressed, but is the factory lubrication for the Zwift ride compatible with strip chip?
00:21:48 Hottie
And any other marginal gains that can be done to a Zwift ride or similar indoor bike that attaches to a trainer.
00:21:54 Josh
Oh, that's a great question.
00:21:56 Josh
And thank you.
00:21:58 Josh
I see Hadi or Fatty, one of you is telling me it's a KMC Z1 chain.
00:22:04 Josh
So it is just a factory greased chain.
00:22:06 Josh
So yes, you can.
00:22:08 Josh
It is compatible with strip chip for waxing.
00:22:12 Josh
Gosh, as far as the other marginal gains on a Zwift ride,
00:22:18 Josh
I'm not going to say there's really, other than taking care of the chain, the drivetrain, keep it clean, wax it.
00:22:25 Josh
There's not a whole lot you can do to add efficiency there.
00:22:28 Josh
But I mean, the big one, well, I guess you could replace the chain with a faster chain.
00:22:36 Josh
You know, you can't, quite frankly, you just can't beat a Dura-Ace chain.
00:22:42 Josh
I mean, you know, it just, there's just nothing out there.
00:22:46 Josh
quite as fast as that.
00:22:47 Josh
So yeah, Dura's chain, wax it, or buy a pre-waxed one.
00:22:52 Josh
But if you don't want to go quite that far, wax the one that you've got, keep it clean.
00:22:59 Josh
And then I would say with all of these indoor specific bikes, no matter which one you've got, I mean, the biggest opportunity there is wiping the thing down and cleaning it somewhat regularly to avoid corrosion, because corrosion is just the death of these things.
00:23:16 Josh
I know Zwift and a number of companies have, Wahoo's got one, have sort of dedicated indoor bikes.
00:23:26 Josh
And they still, I mean, you can kill the thing in a winter if you're sweating all over it and not keeping it clean.
00:23:32 Josh
So something like a good, we make a waterless wash product that actually has a protective silicon dioxide wax residue that it leaves behind that hardens.
00:23:44 Josh
It's anti-static, so it does help kind of keep dust from sticking to it, but it also is protective of sweat.
00:23:51 Josh
And when you use it to clean, it will kind of clean and dissolve sweat.
00:23:55 Josh
So, you know, if you're wiping the **** you know, spray your microfiber towel, wipe the thing down after each ride, you're going to get
00:24:04 Josh
multiple additional years of use out of it before it starts to rust compared to, if you never touch it, I've seen those things absolutely smoked in one winter if you're riding a decent amount.
00:24:16 Fatty
Yep, and it will also make it so your room doesn't stink as bad.
00:24:20 Fatty
Make your bike room smell less like a gym locker.
00:24:25 Fatty
I feel like I'm the guy who knows the, has the least knowledge of most things, but I also think I'm the guy who spends the most time on a trainer in the winter.
00:24:34 Fatty
So I've got a few answers as well.
00:24:37 Fatty
This isn't a marginal gain, but this is something that can take your time in on the Zwift trainer or whatever and make it so that it is helpful when you get back outside.
00:24:50 Fatty
Take that saddle that comes with the Zwift ride, get rid of it, put your actual saddle on the one that you use.
00:24:57 Fatty
Get rid of the bar that comes with that Zift ride.
00:24:59 Fatty
Put the kind of bar that you actually use on it.
00:25:03 Fatty
makes a difference.
00:25:04 Fatty
You're going to feel a lot better.
00:25:06 Fatty
Next, when you ride, the temptation is to wear your old bibs.
00:25:10 Fatty
Instead, wear your new bibs.
00:25:13 Fatty
You are sitting so much more often when you do Zwift or Trainer Road or whatever.
00:25:19 Fatty
Wear your good bibs.
00:25:20 Fatty
It makes a difference.
00:25:22 Fatty
Buy a bunch of cheap fans.
00:25:23 Fatty
Go to
00:25:25 Fatty
Amazon or Walmart or wherever and buy a bunch of them.
00:25:28 Fatty
I keep 3 fans going when I am on the trainer.
00:25:32 Fatty
It makes a big difference in how long I can tolerate being on the thing.
00:25:41 Fatty
Protect your house by putting, don't, everyone does a yoga mat under their trainer.
00:25:47 Fatty
I buy a giant office floor mat and then I put the yoga mat on it.
00:25:54 Fatty
The more layers you can have, and this is only important if you're not doing this in the garage.
00:25:59 Fatty
If you're doing this in the garage, you know, go nuts.
00:26:01 Fatty
Just sweat directly onto it.
00:26:03 Fatty
But if you are on a wood or tile or granite or carpet, worst of all,
00:26:12 Fatty
Get a few layers in between just to save your floor from destruction.
00:26:17 Fatty
Here's one that I do that I don't think many people do.
00:26:20 Fatty
I put a big cheap TV on the wall and have my Zwift and my trainer Rd.
00:26:26 Fatty
on top of that.
00:26:27 Fatty
Well, Zwift, not trainer Rd.
00:26:29 Fatty
And that is nice because when you are looking forward like you do when you ride your bike, you are not staring at your stem.
00:26:39 Fatty
and you aren't training yourself to be staring down.
00:26:42 Fatty
And that is a part of training.
00:26:44 Fatty
And I use Synergy for my lube.
00:26:48 Fatty
I, well, I'm lazy about wax.
00:26:50 Fatty
I know you guys are all into it, but Synergy chain lube works great for me, for my bike through the whole winter.
00:26:59 Fatty
Probably apply about twice, three times in three months.
00:27:04 Fatty
And then, and this is just a don't make this mistake like I have, put some little wedges in between your rear brake pads just in case you get into your Zwifting a little too much and grab some brake on the descent.
00:27:21 Fatty
That way you don't have to recalibrate those pistons.
00:27:24 Fatty
And like Josh says, clean up after you're done.
00:27:27 Hottie
Yep, okay.
00:27:28 Hottie
All right, let's head back outside now where moist riding is done.
00:27:33 Hottie
Fatty Josh, I had a great chance.
00:27:34 Hottie
recently to ride a 30 tour mountain bike and came away with an AJA.
00:27:41 Hottie
First I want to thank Newhouse Metalworks and engineer Daniel Gang for taking me on a test ride.
00:27:46 Hottie
I rode their Newhouse Nova, a 32 inch wheeled rigid bike.
00:27:51 Hottie
There's an interview with Daniel and in our feed.
00:27:53 Hottie
So if you want to learn more about
00:27:55 Hottie
the wheel size and ride impressions, it's there on our feed.
00:27:57 Hottie
You can also watch Daniel and I on the 30 Tour by going to his YouTube channel, that is Yang MFG.
00:28:04 Hottie
Now Josh, one of the things I came away with was the impressive traction the bike had.
00:28:10 Hottie
I normally run a rigid bike on mountains, 29er.
00:28:14 Hottie
On the test ride, we had both bikes.
00:28:17 Hottie
We actually had a front suspended 29er on hand for some AB comparison.
00:28:22 Hottie
and of course the 32-er both had 2.4 XC tires.
00:28:27 Hottie
As soon as I went on to the 29 or as immediately wanted to get back on the 32-er, I was like, give me that bike back.
00:28:33 Hottie
During the ride, I was thinking about what happens when a wheel size is increased by 3 inches in this case.
00:28:39 Hottie
I assumed it lengthens the tire contact patch.
00:28:43 Hottie
Now we've talked on this show
00:28:45 Hottie
A lot about contact patch, and we've come away with, hey, usually wider is better, especially for speed and for ride quality too.
00:28:52 Hottie
But Josh, can a longer contact patch also be better?
00:28:56 Hottie
Or is there something else at play here?
00:28:58 Josh
Yeah, so it's kind of a cool one because that's a, you know, like pretty extreme step up, you know, in size.
00:29:07 Josh
And there's a 36er.
00:29:09 Josh
two that exist.
00:29:10 Josh
I think Leonard Sinn is doing something with those, but you have to be like, you have to be like 615 or something tall to drive that, right?
00:29:20 Josh
it.
00:29:22 Josh
So yeah, I think you're probably feeling you are naturally getting a longer contact patch.
00:29:28 Josh
There is naturally going to be a slight improvement in rolling resistance for equivalent tire construction to having a larger diameter wheel because there's just less casing deflection
00:29:39 Josh
happening to make, you think of what the contact patch for a given pressure is trying to make an area of contact with the ground.
00:29:48 Josh
And so when you're presenting, we call this the, there's like the angle of entry and the angle of exit of the tire.
00:29:57 Josh
You're just presenting less angle, there's less deflection.
00:29:59 Josh
And so you are ending up with a slightly longer patch and a lower
00:30:05 Josh
sink percentage of that tire for that given air pressure.
00:30:10 Josh
So you actually can run slightly lower pressures to get the same sink percentage or drop, some people call it, on this wheel because you're recruiting additional casing to make that contact patch more easily because of that approach angle front and back.
00:30:29 Josh
So that's all pretty cool.
00:30:31 Josh
The other thing that you get with these tires that has always interested me, and you certainly see this, I would say you notice this most in like triathlon bikes with 650 wheels.
00:30:46 Josh
The longer contact patch does bring in a little bit more kind of damping about the steering axis when you're steering the bike.
00:30:55 Josh
And also it takes away a little bit of leverage that the ground has to turn the wheel on your behalf, right?
00:31:06 Josh
Or I guess turn the wheel with like, a little stone hitting off center.
00:31:10 Josh
There's less force like wanting to kind of like pull the wheel to one side or the other.
00:31:14 Josh
So they do tend to naturally feel a little bit more stable and you're recruiting that contact patch more easily.
00:31:22 Josh
So I think there's a lot of potential pluses
00:31:26 Josh
to it when you think of it that way.
00:31:27 Josh
Now, the flip side, of course, is that it's a lot of stuff that's now getting much bigger and heavier and kind of all of those things.
00:31:37 Josh
And then certainly for smaller people, there's cases where like the geometry just, you're not going to be able to make it work unless you do some really crazy things with the bike.
00:31:46 Josh
And so you may end up giving back any
00:31:50 Josh
any benefit there by changing your geometry in a way that, you've, what you've gained on the one hand, you're giving back in geometry of the bike as you would want to ride it or as would feel good to you to ride it.
00:32:04 Hottie
Yeah.
00:32:05 Hottie
We did discuss that too, that the wheel size is more than likely for people
00:32:11 Hottie
at least 5'8, probably taller than that.
00:32:14 Hottie
I mean, who knows in the end, that's where we kind of 29 are kind of starting that world too, right?
00:32:18 Hottie
People are like, well, it seems really big and small people have a hard time getting, fit for that type of bike.
00:32:24 Hottie
So we both agreed, at least on the outset, that it seemed like something for taller riders.
00:32:31 Hottie
And it
00:32:33 Hottie
wouldn't be one of these ubiquitous bikes where you would see it in downhill racing or even enduro racing.
00:32:39 Hottie
It's felt like more of a bike meant for fire roads, fast fire roads, fast style riding, maybe some light single track, maybe some endurance riding too, even an unbound if you could keep right the platform and everything down in weight.
00:32:53 Hottie
And if it moves to, this is a steel bike we're talking about, if it moves to the carbon world and
00:32:59 Hottie
boom.
00:33:00 Hottie
I mean, you're going to be able to get things pretty light on a bike like that.
00:33:03 Hottie
So it's not a, I think a lot of people are looking at the platform and going, oh, what do we need another wheel size for?
00:33:10 Hottie
This is going to make everything else obsolete.
00:33:12 Hottie
I don't think anybody's saying that right now.
00:33:15 Hottie
It's more kind of in that test experimental period.
00:33:17 Hottie
Like, let's see if this thing works.
00:33:19 Hottie
And Daniel and I, my ride was an hour and a half long, so I don't have a true understanding of how well it could perform.
00:33:26 Hottie
We both kind of agreed that
00:33:28 Hottie
in certain situations, it does seem to make a lot of sense.
00:33:31 Hottie
Fast fire roads, rough terrain, and tall riders.
00:33:35 Fatty
Seems like it could be a good lead field wheel, for sure.
00:33:38 Fatty
I mean, it really does.
00:33:38 Fatty
For that kind of terrain, for that kind of distance, for that kind of technical.
00:33:44 Fatty
Yeah.
00:33:44 Fatty
All right, let's pivot away from exotic wheels, at least for the moment, to everyday riders.
00:33:50 Fatty
People like me, and I suspect a fair number of our listeners.
00:33:54 Fatty
Here's Steve from Virginia.
00:33:55 Fatty
He texted into the marginal gains hotline,
00:33:58 Fatty
Here's what he had to say.
00:33:59 Speaker 5
Hey, Fatty, Hottie, and Josh.
00:34:01 Speaker 5
This is Steve Nagy from Virginia.
00:34:04 Speaker 5
I realize this is marginal gains, not only in title, but in substance.
00:34:08 Speaker 5
But I think there's an element here that could help out us average Joes out here.
00:34:14 Speaker 5
And I'll use myself as an example.
00:34:16 Speaker 5
I'm an 85 kilogram rider.
00:34:18 Speaker 5
I ride an older model Pinarello Gon that's probably, let's say, 18 pounds.
00:34:25 Speaker 5
And I don't ride, obviously, at the speeds that a pro rider does, or even a high-end amateur rider.
00:34:31 Speaker 5
So what in the marginal gains world is eligible for me?
00:34:35 Speaker 5
Oh, one final note.
00:34:37 Speaker 5
Love to hear Josh's thoughts on SRAM versus UCI on the whole controversy that surrounds their use of the tent tooth caught.
00:34:46 Speaker 5
Thanks as always, and appreciate the output of the shows.
00:34:50 Fatty
I love that, I mean, I do want you to get to the second, the entirely
00:34:54 Fatty
disconnected, second part of his message.
00:34:58 Fatty
But the marginal gains for regular folks question, I think, is really the part that I think is most interesting.
00:35:09 Josh
Agreed, agreed.
00:35:10 Josh
And it's a great, it's a great question.
00:35:12 Josh
The biggest marginal gains available to the rest of us, right?
00:35:17 Josh
I would say starting with
00:35:20 Josh
like tight fitting clothing.
00:35:21 Josh
And of course, the bigger you get, the more uncomfortable that can be.
00:35:25 Josh
But we've talked about it before.
00:35:27 Josh
I mean, you just can't, I can't overstate how bad flappy clothing is.
00:35:34 Josh
I mean, it's in the 10s of, you know, a poor fitting jersey can be like 25 watts at 30 miles an hour.
00:35:42 Josh
And, you know, it's whatever 1/3 of that at the speeds that we're talking about here.
00:35:47 Josh
But that's, it's still a lot.
00:35:51 Josh
something like an aero helmet, it's, you're going to wear your helmet anyway, you can get one that's just a bit faster than the others.
00:36:00 Josh
But I think the biggest one that for me also just improves the whole experience is find the right tire for your roads.
00:36:12 Josh
Like you want to find the lightest, fastest rolling
00:36:17 Josh
higher that can survive the roads where you live.
00:36:22 Josh
get, especially if you get bigger, get a bigger one.
00:36:26 Josh
I would say in most cases, I'm not, I don't remember what the Pinarello Gon was, but if it's an older model, I mean, maybe it can fit 28s, then go to 28s.
00:36:37 Josh
If it can fit 30s, go to 30s.
00:36:42 Josh
the speeds most of us are riding, aero is absolutely in play, but to a lesser extent than rolling resistance.
00:36:49 Josh
But that slightly bigger tire at slightly lower pressure, especially if you're going to a very low rolling resistance tire, it's just going to dramatically improve the ride experience, right?
00:37:00 Josh
It's more comfortable.
00:37:02 Josh
It'll corner better, handle better.
00:37:06 Josh
You'll roll faster and you'll roll, at the speeds most of us are riding, rolling resistance is a bigger factor than arrow for most of the riding.
00:37:16 Josh
If you're riding in the 18 to 20 mile an hour range, most of the time, rolling resistance is a bigger factor for you than arrow.
00:37:24 Josh
But you can also reap all these other benefits from it.
00:37:27 Josh
And then it's up to you, know, do you want to
00:37:30 Josh
I would say if you find a tire that can fit your bike that will allow you to run pressures, optimal pressures below 60, run it tubeless.
00:37:41 Josh
If you still need more than that, then run it with a latex or a TPU tube.
00:37:48 Josh
Yeah, and it'll, one, it feels better because it has a lower dynamic stiffness than a higher hysteresis sputal tube.
00:37:56 Josh
But
00:37:58 Josh
So you'll have the efficiency gain, yeah, from those tubes.
00:38:03 Josh
And then you will, the tubeless sealants out there, like our stuff, it works okay at 72, but the more, by the time you get to 80, I always think of it as sort of like a percentages game.
00:38:15 Josh
It's like you watch those like World Series of Poker or whatever, and you see their hands and they're, you know, this hand has an 80% chance of winning and, you know, you can still flip that card and like, boom, it's a loser hand.
00:38:27 Josh
that is definitely the situation I would say with any sealant, including our own, when you start getting up into those higher 80, 90, 100 PSI pressures.
00:38:39 Josh
It can work.
00:38:41 Josh
It's just your likelihood of it working is going down with every additional PSI or 10th of a bar that you're putting into it.
00:38:47 Hottie
A marginal gain, you know, marginal, one of the problems we have is what we call ourselves, marginal gains.
00:38:52 Hottie
Like people hear that word and they go, well, it's not for me, that's for pros.
00:38:55 Hottie
But marginal gains can be not making a faster ride, but making your ride better.
00:38:59 Hottie
Like nice tires make for a better ride.
00:39:02 Hottie
And sealant and good sealant means you may not be pulled over the side of the road with a flat.
00:39:07 Hottie
And a clean and nice lube on your chain means a cleaner bike all the time.
00:39:12 Hottie
Like those are great marginal gains in my book, right?
00:39:16 Hottie
I mean, I do all that stuff on my wife's bike and she's not tearing it up out there, but
00:39:23 Hottie
She's appreciative, like she doesn't get a flat.
00:39:26 Hottie
She loves her quiet drive train and not getting a chain mark on her calf.
00:39:30 Hottie
And right, I mean, and her bike looks pretty all the time.
00:39:34 Josh
It's funny, I'll tell you, we have seen this uptick in the last few months of shops, you know, these are people not listening to marginal gains, but shops selling chain waxing to
00:39:49 Josh
people buying kids bikes and people buying like cruisers and things and they're selling it because it's and it's a lot of our customers like, hey, I don't race anymore or care, but man, my bike stays so clean.
00:39:59 Josh
And so, you got the shop talking with the parents and hey, for, whatever, 35, 45, $50, we can put a 1000 mile coating on that chain, right?
00:40:10 Josh
If you're using endurance chip,
00:40:12 Josh
And it'll never get dirty.
00:40:14 Josh
It'll never leave a chain ring tattoo.
00:40:16 Josh
You can put it in the back of your, you know, your SUV without, you know, getting grease all over the place.
00:40:22 Josh
And the people are like, absolutely, that sounds fabulous.
00:40:26 Josh
And so I just love to hear that because it is so many of our customers say, gosh, chain waxing is great, but the biggest one is my bike doesn't get dirty or it stays clean and I'm cleaning it less often.
00:40:39 Josh
We still have people who are like, hey, I clean my bike once a year.
00:40:41 Josh
I don't care.
00:40:42 Josh
I don't care.
00:40:43 Josh
You know, and that's fine too.
00:40:46 Josh
But yeah, if you appreciate like a clean, good looking bike, you know, personally, I'm at the age where my only criteria in picking a bike is the paint job.
00:40:56 Josh
And then having it, looks, it needs to look so much better than my ability to ride it.
00:41:02 Josh
That's all that matters.
00:41:06 Fatty
One last question here, Josh.
00:41:10 Josh
Oh, wait, we didn't get to the hand grenade.
00:41:11 Fatty
Oh, the hand grenade.
00:41:12 Josh
Oh, ****.
00:41:14 Josh
Oh, God.
00:41:15 Josh
Okay.
00:41:16 Josh
Totally.
00:41:16 Josh
Yeah.
00:41:16 Josh
No, it just hit me.
00:41:18 Josh
Oh, man.
00:41:19 Josh
No, this, I actually had said this the other day to one of the folks in the office here.
00:41:27 Josh
This SRAM
00:41:30 Josh
winning against the UCI in Belgium is, I'm thrilled.
00:41:34 Josh
I'm thrilled.
00:41:34 Josh
And I think I'm thrilled that I think it will change, hopefully, the ability of the UCI to just make up this arbitrary like ******** that they just comes out of left field, you know, like from heaven, right?
00:41:49 Josh
Left field heaven, where they're like, oh, and you know, the Lord now saith, there will no longer be 10 tooth cogs and whatever.
00:41:57 Josh
It's a nightmare.
00:41:58 Josh
It's a nightmare.
00:41:59 Josh
And I hate, you guys know, I hate the 10-tooth cog.
00:42:01 Josh
Hate it, right?
00:42:02 Josh
But this is, I mean, it's a little bit like freedom of speech, right?
00:42:04 Josh
Like, I hate that, you know, you're whatever using that racial slur, but I will defend your right to say it.
00:42:13 Josh
Like, and that's kind of this like, I hate the 10-tooth cog, but you know what?
00:42:17 Josh
If people want to ride it, go for it.
00:42:20 Josh
Wait, who is the UCI to just,
00:42:23 Josh
make up some garbage and come at it.
00:42:26 Josh
It's terrible.
00:42:27 Josh
And they do it all the time, right?
00:42:30 Josh
I think, in my dream world, it would all be my decision and I would just on appearance be like, no, that looks stupid.
00:42:37 Josh
Don't do that.
00:42:39 Josh
You know, I will say some of these.
00:42:41 Josh
Some of these like, I mean, who's the guy with the like 180 millimeter, 35 degree upturn stem with the super narrow bars?
00:42:50 Josh
I'm like, the marginal gainer in me is like, that's interesting.
00:42:54 Josh
But the bike racer in me goes, just stop that.
00:42:56 Fatty
Just stop.
00:42:57 Josh
Like that, looks terrible.
00:43:00 Josh
Like, the thought process just needs to be like, if you're a 12 year old kid at home,
00:43:07 Josh
who hears about bike racing for the first time and goes and looks it up online, or you stumble across a bicycling magazine, God forbid in a bookstore, which hardly exists anymore.
00:43:20 Josh
Like, I want that kid who was me to look at that and be like, oh, that looks so cool.
00:43:27 Josh
Like, oh man, I wanna be, I wanna be like these people.
00:43:31 Josh
Like, this is awesome.
00:43:34 Josh
And so I think to me, deep down,
00:43:37 Josh
That's my thing.
00:43:39 Josh
Like that should be our line.
00:43:40 Josh
Like, would the 12 year old kid in the bookstore want to be like these people?
00:43:44 Josh
And if you're wearing knee-high arrow socks and the, foot and a half long upturn stem with the, and the, no, just stop that.
00:43:57 Josh
Like just,
00:43:59 Josh
If it were up to me, everybody would have to ride in the position of Frank Vandenbrook, right?
00:44:05 Josh
That was like, or like the old mercs, like, nope, you need to look like that.
00:44:08 Josh
That's beautiful.
00:44:09 Josh
But I mean, all joking aside, I just don't understand why these ******** who can't seem to put together a safe route, you know, like let's
00:44:24 Josh
let's get the traffic furniture removed from this thing.
00:44:27 Josh
Let's get, let's get the cars off the road.
00:44:29 Josh
Let's get, I mean, Jesus, like, there's so many things that can really hurt the riders and routinely are really hurting the riders.
00:44:38 Josh
And then they back that up to like, oh no, the root cause here is that the riders ride too fast because they have a 10 tooth car.
00:44:45 Josh
Gee, I mean, come on.
00:44:46 Josh
Like, that's just, that's, it is so intellectually lazy and ridiculous.
00:44:52 Josh
Like,
00:44:53 Josh
No, it's terrible.
00:44:54 Josh
So I, the UCI know that I don't like them, but now they really know it.
00:44:58 Josh
It's just terrible.
00:44:59 Hottie
And I thought some of the teams were somehow adjusting derailers to keep the riders out of that 10 tooth because of its inefficiency or is that, are they using it?
00:45:09 Hottie
Maybe I'm wrong on that?
00:45:10 Josh
Oh, I have heard that too.
00:45:12 Josh
I don't know of anybody doing that, but I've heard it and I think that's, you know, let the chain rings be bigger.
00:45:18 Josh
But I think, I mean, part of it, at the base of it, the UCI's
00:45:22 Josh
The stupidity of the rule, it wasn't directed exactly at the 10-tooth cog.
00:45:26 Josh
It was like a gear inch ratio problem, right?
00:45:30 Josh
And so, yeah, you could solve this by, well, I'm going to run a 72 12.
00:45:37 Josh
And, you know, SRAM's thing was, you know, hey, this is, I mean, my God, I feel, you know, as much as I poop on the 10-tooth cog, I so feel for them.
00:45:45 Josh
Like they've spent
00:45:47 Josh
hundreds of millions of dollars on development and tooling and equipment and manufacturing.
00:45:52 Josh
When you go into that SRAM facility where they're making this new stuff, and I mean, my God, it's like something out of the future.
00:45:59 Josh
It's robot arms.
00:46:00 Josh
And I mean, it's the time and the effort and the energy and the money to design and develop and to build this stuff.
00:46:09 Josh
And it really works, right?
00:46:11 Josh
And people really love it.
00:46:13 Josh
And
00:46:14 Josh
And then to just have these random ******** show up and be like, that's illegal, starting four months from now, right?
00:46:21 Josh
I mean, it's insanity.
00:46:24 Josh
It's insanity.
00:46:25 Josh
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