Why It's Almost Impossible to Ride a Bike 60 Kilometers in One Hour | WIRED

Intro when most people think of cycling they think of the steep hills and thrilling Sprint's of the Tour de France but one of the sports oldest and most coveted records is something called the hour record it's very simple one person one bike riding for one hour on a track like this how much distance can they cover the first official record was set in the late 1800s and since then many of the Great's of the sport have attempted the hour today the men's record is fifty four point five to six kilometers or just under thirty four miles for women it's forty eight point zero zero seven kilometers just shy of 30 miles so can somebody ride even farther today we're gonna look at why riding sixty kilometers in one hour is almost impossible to find out what it The Hour Record takes I tried riding as hard as the current record-holder discuss the pain of riding that hard for a full hour with someone who's done it all your body is you're screaming stop stop good very good and working the sports scientist to find out what my body is capable I still choose into the 50s perfect that's excellent the hour record has been called the purest of all cycling races but actually doing it is anything but simple it's become a team effort with designers coaches and athletes all trying to roll just a bit further they use state-of-the-art tools like wind tunnels and power meters to gain every competitive advantage no detail is too small you have the wheels the frame the helmet in the shape of that helmet you know we can get somebody to save quite a bit of drag but first you've got to have the strength and stamina to push hard for an hour the hour record is a very personal endeavor it's all about you your machine and how much power you can put out for 60 minutes straight it's usually a lot of power and to be very consistent it's a lot harder than it sounds but today I'm gonna try to maintain the same power as the current men's world-record holder and just see how long I can last to help me today is Evelyn Stevens she's a former our record holder herself and she is going to be controlling the machine that I'm currently peddling away on Stevens retired from racing in 2016 but before she did she set a new our record by riding an incredible 47 point nine eight kilometers almost 30 months and our records proved to be one of the most if not the most challenging because I did very my career there's a lot that goes into the hour but one way that cyclists look at racing these days is through something called power output it's measured in watts a bike commuter might generate about 100 watts pro sprinters can generate nearly 2,000 watts but only in short bursts the hour is all about a steady prolonged power it's kind of a meditative process in a masochistic way when Stevens set her record she kept up an output of around 300 watts for a full hour Bradley Wiggins who has the current men's record is estimated to have cranked out 440 watts for an hour so what kind of power output Power Output am i having right now so Robbie you're currently going 150 watts okay and how much power do I need to put out we're gonna need to get you to 440 watts okay so next up 200 all right Stephens used an app to increase the wattage on my trainer which made it harder and harder for me to pedal okay you're now at 200 all right your 250 how's it feeling hard ready for the next yeah let's take it to 300 let's get there oh that's way harder if I watch you increase it like that so Evelyn I've heard that when you're actually trying this record you aren't actually allowed to look at your power output no when you do the record you have no data whatsoever so you have no power no rpm note I'm no distance nothing you are just it is truly you in your machine okay I think this is kind of a probably an uncomfortable level so I think we should keep going let's go right so go right to 400 okay we're at 401 okay which we just go right to 440 yeah okay you're 441 we're gonna be full of extra so remember he did this for 60 minutes all right you guys what was that about 30 seconds I think Robbie can you do it for an hour no I think you held that for about 45 seconds god that was ridiculous you'd have to hold that more than 60 times longer than I held it yeah and actually focus on where you're going and you do it from a standing start oh that sounds miserable that misery is what cyclists call the pain cave and enduring it before a full hour is incredibly difficult Stephens told me that she nearly cracked with only a few minutes left during her attempt there was I think about minute 50 to 55 of our record I lost it and that's because I was physically in the most beautiful place I've ever been to come anywhere close to setting an endurance record like the hour you have to be physically gifted and one of the greatest gifts a cyclist can have is a Monstress vo2 max it's a measure of how good your body is at getting oxygen out of the air and into your tissues vo2 max is a value that we test in the lab and we identify because really sets the upper limit of how much energy can be produced that is Neal Henderson he's the sports scientist who coach Stevens to her record and Rowan Dennis to his both athletes have massive vo2 max numbers the thing is vo2 max output can only be sustained for maybe 5 or 10 minutes well trained athlete but a pro athlete can perform at a level just below their vo2 max for quite a bit longer than that that level is called their anaerobic threshold to find it you measure something called lactate in the blood too much lactate and the effort can't be sustained those two tests in concert tell us what that absolute ceiling is and then how close to that ceiling you can redline and hold to find my limits Henderson put me through the same exercise that Stevens did but this time he sampled my blood while I rode on the stationary bike 6.8 we blew through finally so you got a 2.1 millimole change on that stage that clearly indicates that you were basically lactate was coming out of over the top then he tested my vo2 max so this is a two-way valve so he's gonna be breathing in and getting air from out here and then as he exhales it's gonna lock that off and then what he exhales is going to go in through here into the analyzer this doesn't look intimidating at all same deal I wrote harder and harder and he measured my oxygen levels I reached this point where I kept telling myself like ten more seconds ten more seconds ten more seconds right like I can do 10 more seconds but around halfway through the 3:20 stage my body was just like no can't do ten more seconds Iran tastic what was my vo2 max your vo2 max the absolute peak got into the 50s and in fact 50 2.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute which is very good I don't think you're gonna set an hour record tomorrow with that but that is well above an average value so an Evy's value is what 72-73 the number of people on earth with vo2 max is in the 70s is just vanishing very small yeah women in the 70s is like men amis there's The Fit okay so I'm definitely not a contender for the our ring but that doesn't mean I can't try to get faster I went to bike manufacturers specialized to get a pro fit on a bike very similar to the one that Stevens used to set her record but first a new happen then I got a custom totally pro level treatment from specialist Aaron post Wow yeah this is super aggressive already yeah he used an LED motion capture system to dial in every aspect of my position on the bike yeah he just did your first 180 on a bike my friend I figured I wanted to get as low as possible to minimize wind resistance but post says that's not always the case the arrow position is only arrow when you're in the arrow position it doesn't matter how cool your bike looks in transition area or sitting out there for the photo shoot before you go for an hour record if you can't stay in those Aero bars you're not going to be faster he's right staying in arrow position can be limiting to low and it makes it hard to breathe it can even restrict blood flow with my fit dialed in I went into this beast it's called the wind tunnel WI n get it all right you're gonna go fast right most wind tunnels are for testing cars and aircraft this one is made for people Evelyn Stephens perfected her our record position here I tried riding in slightly different positions while the team had specialized captured my aerodynamics data I tried the lowest possible arrow bar position for my fitting and then I tried at 2 centimeters higher which felt a lot better why so much focus on this because handlebars matter a lot to the hour record in the 1990s racer started exploiting unconventional and profoundly aerodynamic handlebar positions like the praying mantis the arms tucked up to the shoulders chris boardman set what is now called the absolute our record at fifty six point three kilometers this the Superman position arms stretched out into an air slicing Dart but in 1997 the rules changed everyone had to use classic drop bars and under those constraints no one could touch the absolute record but then in 2014 the rules changed again allowing for a sort of in-between position arrow bars like these don't slice the wind like the Superman did but they're way faster than drop bars alright so what the results The Results show all right so your baseline position again was the most aggressive and lowest that we thought you could sustain in the fit lab if we raise the pads to centimeters because you said that hey that lower position might not be sustainable especially over an hour so we raise it the two centimeters and for you it turned out that that position was actually absolutely no different in the aerodynamic drag so as an athlete that's a win-win you're able to hold the position you're able to generate more power and there's no aerodynamic drag penalty now the icing on the cake on top of all that is with that higher Pat position you were a lot more comfortable getting more aggressive with your head shrug and by doing that that saved a further about 5% or 15 watts as he from your position which is enormous when you're trying to go as fast as possible Putting It All Together to put it all together Henderson took me to the US Olympic track in Colorado Springs where Stephen set her record once you've gotten up to speed hold right about 200 watts first I wrote it on a standard track bike given my measurements 200 watts for an hour seemed possible right around 35 35 7 yep but I'd only go about 35 kilometers just under 22 miles hardly a record-setting distance so Henderson swapped out some components the first thing I'm gonna change out here is gonna be the front wheel this will actually make even more difference than the rear wheel since this is the leading edge the other thing we do is in terms of the tire width this is an extremely narrow higher on this extremely narrow ribbed even if I wasn't born with a massive vo2 max I could still be faster you are aerodynamically enhanced double disc front rear arrow bars arrow helmet itsgotime let's see what you got all right we're gonna go the same target power 200 watts you're gonna see here but we should see clearly some significant increase in your speed next level all right with the same power output I was suddenly able to pedal almost 40 kilometers an hour we're nearly 25 miles per hour you just went 10% faster yeah that's that's big same output 10% faster another way to look at that is it took us five minutes to put on about $5,000 with the parts to buy it's about five kilometers per hour I looked faster and I definitely felt faster but I hadn't even approached the record speeds or tried to crank them out for 60 minutes remember I couldn't even do a full minute on the trainer at the sort of power needed to challenge the men's record this event isn't about all-out power it's about metering your effort just right for an entire hour and if you overcook it there's a price to be paid if you start too fast you're trying to do something that's effectively not possible these margins are so very small then if you go over that effort by just a small amount point five percent doesn't sound like much you know for a male cyclist a high level rider that's literally a couple watts but the cost of exceeding that can on the end in the last 10 or 15 minutes cost 10 15 20 50 watts that they can no longer produce what was just a half a percent too much for the first 45 minutes and then they fade out and the speed drops to get a sense of what the pros experience Henderson paced me with an electric motorcycle first I tried riding 48 kilometers an hour the women's speed record then I tried the men's speed as you can see I was wobbling all over the place it's one thing to try and ride this hard on a trainer do we get on the track felt dangerous so we got up the throwing speed 52 and a half K an hour and about a lap battle laugh as much as gear and training matter so does the track concrete tracks like the one at Colorado Springs are a little slower than wooden ones and the tracks location and altitude make a big difference as well ultimately a given rider can produce a certain amount of power output the amount of power is going to affect the speed they go but your selection of what track and where you go is gonna have an impact on aerodynamics and air density specifically so when we come up to altitude like we are here in Colorado the air is less dense though you also have a physiological constraint that you cannot produce quite as much power as you would at sea level in most cases there's a benefit though to performing at altitude especially if you have conditioning and training being done at altitudes over here prepares for the past when Italian racer vitória busi broke Stephens record she went just 27 meters further when she did it on a wooden track in Aguascalientes Mexico it's where many cycling records have been set ah gross calientes is that faster track it's at altitude it's about 1,800 meters high so it's just a touch higher than Boulder here because of the air density which is really the barometric pressure and humidity interactions tends to be much warmer and then it's a wood 250 meter track versus a concrete 333 so it's got all the right characteristics to be very fast how fast let's just say that I attempted the hour at 200 watts on this bike with this gear now I'm not gonna set a record by any means but the right track could make a big difference at an outdoor velodrome like the one in Trexler town Pennsylvania I would ride 37.3 5 kilometers but in Colorado Springs I'd get thirty eight point seven five and in aguas calientes I would jump to full kilometres and go forty point nine and that's just the track factoring in their position and equipment can give an elite cyclists just enough edge to claim the record so will we ever see the men's record hit sixty kilometers or the women's hit fifty maybe I do believe that fifty kilometers per hour is definitely in the realm for the women they're currently just just under two kilometers shy of that I do believe that than then even with the current position we'll be getting into the fifty five and even fifty six kilometers maybe fifty seven to break the 60 kilometre barrier under current rules Henderson says you need a person capable of generating 450 watts while tucked into what would likely be a very painful arrow position and they'd probably have to do it in aguas calientes but until that happens remember that what athletes are doing already is almost impossible [Applause]