Name: Faster
ISBN: 9781408843758

Faster

For professional cyclists, going faster and winning are, of course, closely related. Yet surprisingly, for many, a desire to go faster is much more important than a desire to win. Someone who wants to go faster will work at the details and take small steps rather than focusing on winning. Winning just happens when you do everything right - it's the doing everything right that's hard. And that's what fascinates and obsesses Michael Hutchinson. With his usual deadpan delivery and an awareness that it's all mildly preposterous, Hutchinson looks at the things that make you faster - training, nutrition, the right psychology - and explains how they work, and how what we know about them changes all the time. He looks at the things that make you slower, and why, and how attempts to avoid them can result in serious athletes gradually painting themselves into the most peculiar life-style corners. Faster is a book about why cyclists do what they do, about what the riders, their coaches and the boffins get up to behind the scenes, and about why the whole idea of going faster is such an appealing, universal instinct for all of us.

What Hacker News says

ibmthrowaway218Oct 2017

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Faster-Obsession-Science-Fastest-Cy... is an interesting read related to this.

(Cycling obviously, but the genetics behind VO2max apply across different types of physical activity.)

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nlSep 2014

The Specialized video[1] is worth watching - it's pretty funny how astonished they were over how much power it saved.

If you are interested in this, then the book Faster: The Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists by Michael Hutchinson is really good (and very well written).

He notes that human intuition about aerodynamics just isn't very good (you have to test) and that the current state of the art is no longer wind tunnel testing but computational fluid dynamics (CFD) followed by testing with a power meter on the road.

CFD lets designers iterate much quicker on designs and try things outside the norm (avoiding the local maxima problem). Power meters plus riding is better than wind tunnel testing because things like variable cross winds are very hard to test in wind tunnels.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZnrE17Jg3I

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Obsession-Science-Fastest-Cycli...

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LioNov 2023

Riders like Pidcock, Van Aert and Van der Pole will be racing all year round swapping between Road, MTB and Cyclocross.

In "Faster: The Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists" Michael Hutchinson talks about how much effort Team Sky/Inneos into planing diets.

They copied the way doctors help cancer and terminally ill patients that have difficulty absorbing nutrients. The team use medical dietitians work out exact plans for each rider.

The final ingredient is guilt. Geraint Thomas talks on his podcast about how he could go off plan when no one is watching but that he knows it will come out when the team next meet up and start measuring performance. Guilt and fear of failure keeps them on the programme.

It's no coincidence that a lot of professional cyclist go a bit off they rails after they finally retire.

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LioMay 2022

As I understand it, based on books such as Faster[1] by Michael Hutchinson, it depends on the intensity of what you do.

At low intensity exercise you can just burn just fat.

The body can only get so much energy from fat in a given time, so at higher intensity levels it will try to get energy from both fat and stored carbohydrates.

Once you run out of easily available carbs it will try to supplement energy from the next available store, which is protein. i.e. muscle.

So this will happen well before you run out of body fat.

You can apparently increase the amount of base energy you can get from fat by training cell mitochondria with lots of low internet exercise.

Eg lots and lots of zone 1 or 2 on the Coggan zone system.

1. http://www.michaelhutchinson.co.uk/faster.html

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