mr b's comeback

[Marco]

I would have thought cycling, especially out of the saddle where i spend a lot of time, is close enough to running. My kneecap tracking alters when i cycle due to the preferential use of the lateral quads in a cycling position, leading to problems, but when i'm dancing on the pedals i'm better off.

I have a running friend with Achilles problems who bought a stand-up-bike (SUB). Which does not have a saddle or any way of fitting one, here is a picture below.



I am toying with building my own. You buy a cheap bike, and you put on a handlebar extender and take the saddle down as low as possible.

You don't take the saddle off for two reasons: Firstly, leaving a pole sticking up below you is asking for something terrible to happen and secondly, you can't indicate whilst standing up (believe me, I've ridden his bike)

[Mike T]

I would have thought cycling, especially out of the saddle where i spend a lot of time, is close enough to running. My kneecap tracking alters when i cycle due to the preferential use of the lateral quads in a cycling position, leading to problems, but when i'm dancing on the pedals i'm better off.

In my teens, within a few months of getting my first bike, I went from being a nobody to being in the sprint team. I have no doubt cycling has a huge carry over into running, and not just for endurance. Those hills where you are out of the saddle surely resemble speed work.

[mr brightside]

Graham, i can see you one one of these. Get it resprayed in Celeste.

[Graham Breeze]

Graham, i can see you one one of these. Get it resprayed in Celeste.

Oh you can can you?

It is the platform pedals that intrigue me

[Marco]

Oh you can can you?

It is the platform pedals that intrigue me

I've seen this bike in the flesh and ridden on it.

I, too, was intrigued by the pedals, so being at the blunt end of the scale I asked the owner what they were for. What he told me was the idea was that you had your whole foot on the pedal, so you could ride it for several hours 'out of the saddle' without getting cramp in your calves or strain your Achilles tendons. (He had done some considerable research before he shelled out his £1500.)

Personally I think the pedals are boll****, and if the bike came my way I'd change them. Conventional pedals, whether they have toe-clips, a clip-in system, or just flat pedals, are such that they make contact with the front of your foot, and exercise and apply tension to the calves and Achilles tendons - not dissimilar to running uphill or fast on the flat. By using these 'whole of the foot' pedals there is no real exercising of the calves and Achilles tendons.

[Marco]

Those hills where you are out of the saddle surely resemble speed work.

To some degree, yes, but I wonder how much cycling out of the saddle uses the hamstring muscles. The mechanism of cycling is that you are pushing downwards; there is only a small amount of backward force, over a very small (compared to running) range of motion.

Coming back to the 80:20 split for easy:hard training intensity, I had a long-buried memory come back to me last night. Back in the early 1980s, when I was in my mid-teens, in winter when the weather was bad I did some improvised indoor training.

Using body weight only, I did endurance squats. Instead of a set number, I would do squats to sides 3 and 4 of Space Ritual (PeteS and Tindersticks will know what I'm on about) which I had on vinyl. Each side is just over 24 minutes, so this session was 2 x 24 minutes of squats as I had to turn it over on the turntable.

I have no idea if this was sensible, or a good idea, but there was no internet and very little in the way of coaching material available to teenagers back then.

The question is, putting boredom to one side, could a session of endurance squatting be a useful substitute for the easier 80 percent of running? From what I have read it seems its muscle use is more similar to running than cycling, and there is no impact stress. Any thoughts?

I still have Space Ritual (digitally re-mastered), so I have all the equipment ...

[Mike T]

To some degree, yes, but I wonder how much cycling out of the saddle uses the hamstring muscles. The mechanism of cycling is that you are pushing downwards; there is only a small amount of backward force, over a very small (compared to running) range of motion.

The main work the hamstrings do when running is slowing down the swing leg when it goes forward. It is the quads that do most of the work, pushing us up, and to a small extent, forward, when our stance foot is behind us. So we do not move forward because our hamstrings are contracting and trying to move our stance leg backwards.

[Travs]

Hamstrings certainly get a workout at fast pace. When i first started doing track sessions it used to take days for my hamstrings to recover.

[mr brightside]

Horsforth harriers track session tonight with coach Kelvin, Bilat intervals, 12/6/3min efforts off 5m rests. I found it quite easy to ramp up the speed and always finished hard from an easy start.

On the way up I was mentally raped by a puff who was very turned on by the skins shorts I was wearing. He was out and proud about how good my arse looked.

[Mike T]

Hamstrings certainly get a workout at fast pace. When i first started doing track sessions it used to take days for my hamstrings to recover.

They are working eccentrically so until they are used to it soreness is almost guaranteed.