Wobbles

Out riding this morning, on an actual road. We picked up the Falco V from Churchill Cycles yesterday so I was able to get out on the TT and do the session from Tuesday as planned.

In between the short efforts prescribed by the session I even managed to catch up with some of the guys from Break Your Limits for a bit of a loop around the river. I had to break off from the group early to get home unfortunately, but it was good to get out with the group for a while. The only downside with riding with the group was that my power meter seemed to get a bit overwhelmed by all the people and totally freaked out, refusing to pick up. I got it going again when I broke off from the group, but I lost a good 20 minutes of data. As you can image, being the good data obsessed triathlete that I am, losing 20 minutes of power data is pretty annoying. I mean what is the point of even being out if I can't record the session in every minute detail, put it online and be judged by it...

Oh well.

Besides temporarily killing my power meter another contribution I got from the guys was a few comments about lateral movement of the back wheel of the Falco. I have had similar comments before and at the time wasn't sure what to make of them. However, hearing similar comments from the BYL guys made me determined to get to the bottom of what was going on. My concern of course being that if the back wheel is moving side to side a lot relative to the rest of the bike you are losing power somewhere due to frame flex. So this morning I spent a bit of time digging through the interweb trying to figure out what is going on. I think I managed to draw some conclusions which I have now added to my Falco V bike review. Rather than retype them I will just copy and paste what I wrote in the review below:

When I ride the Falco V with other people I always get comments about the back wheel moving. I haven't seen it myself (I am working on getting some footage of it) but I gather that it looks like the top of the back wheel is moving from side to side on every pedal stroke. The first time I heard this I freaked out a bit and instantly assumed that I was on some noodly bike that was twisting under torque and stealing all my power. This led me to do a lot of reading into torsional and lateral stiffness in bikes and what exactly steals power, and also a bit of history around beam bikes. Now apparently the phenomenon I am describing was regularly seen in Softrides and there are a lot of people, who upon seeing the movement, made the same assumption I did, that it was causing power loss. However, it is important to understand which part of the bike has to be stiff for power transfer. For power transfer, lateral stiffness is what is important. This is the stiffness between the rear axle and the bottom bracket of the bike. If these two points are moving relative to each other then you are losing power. It is possible that flex in this area is what people are seeing from behind the Falco, but I highly doubt it. The Softride mentioned above was very stiff laterally, stiffer than most 'double diamond' bikes and everything I have felt (and looking at the amount of carbon involved in the Falco) reassures me that the bottom bracket and chainstays on the Falco V are similarly stiff. What I think people are seeing from behind the bike is movement of the seat, via the beam, relative to the rear wheel. From what I have read it would seem that whilst this movement is disconcerting to see (you can't feel it) in reality there is very minimal power loss associated with it. If there is any impact from this movement it will be on bike handling, which I have to say, I haven't really noticed.

Figuring this stuff out reassured me a lot about the Falco. I still intend on looking into a bit more, as I said above it would be great to get some footage so I can see if for myself, built for now I feel a lot more comfortable. In the end, flex or not, I have data that tells me the bike is fast and that is all that really matters at the end of the day.

Running this afternoon. A bit of a longer session running up and down some long, low hills. This was another session that was quite interesting last week and this week it is similar, but new and improved, NOW WITH 20% MORE HILL. Besides the hill bit, the rest of the run is supposed to be nice and steady and I will really working on keeping it that way. My recent revelation that not every run has to be flat out applies to this one too. 

Swimming in the morning. Both pool and ocean. But more on that tomorrow.