Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road • Hacker News Board

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#251

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Jul 05, 2024, 3:10 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #228

jimbokun wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximum calories per liter sounds like something you really want to avoid unless you are engaging in extremely intense exercise.

Sustained cycling is intense exercise. Your body burns through its glucose reserves rapidly, and if you run out of energy the effect ("bonking") is awful. On the other hand, trying to eat a bunch of energy and having too much in your stomach will make you sick and is also awful. So you do in fact want to ingest the most you can process (but no more) per hour, particularly for extended events. Nutrition doesn't matter…

I was referring to how Gatorade is a popular beverage for people not doing any kind of intense exercise, not realizing it's just as bad or worse than soda for weight gain in that case.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#252

Post by tpm » Fri, Jul 05, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

pandaman wrote: post #243

tpm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true, if you can make a ultralight full-featured steel-framed bike there will be buyers. There is a not so small crowd of "weight weenies" and/or steel frame fans willing to spend big.

How do you know? Do you believe weight weenies are only into steel and this is why they don't buy ultralight carbon bikes (there are few under 3kg carbon/composite bikes that had been made but nobody bothers with industrial production of 100K bikes somehow).

3kg bikes are not practical. But I'm pretty sure a complete modern (electronic groupset, disc brakes) circa 7kg steel bike would find buyers, especially as titanium bikes still do find buyers even at prices and weights both higher than comparable carbon bikes.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#253

Post by pandaman » Fri, Jul 05, 2024, 11:05 PM UTC

tpm wrote: post #252

pandaman wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? Do you believe weight weenies are only into steel and this is why they don't buy ultralight carbon bikes (there are few under 3kg carbon/composite bikes that had been made but nobody bothers with industrial production of 100K bikes somehow).

3kg bikes are not practical. But I'm pretty sure a complete modern (electronic groupset, disc brakes) circa 7kg steel bike would find buyers, especially as titanium bikes still do find buyers even at prices and weights both higher than comparable carbon bikes.

You could buy a 5.42kg steel bike with a carbon fork in 2019 https://www.bikeradar.com/news/worlds-lightest-steel-road-bi..., given that a regular steel fork is about 800g, even if the original carbon fork is 0g, you can throw in a steel fork for total 6.2kg. Disc brakes instead of rim brakes would be another 200g. Something tells me those don't sell very well though and the company had not been updating this model ever since. Looks like they've done it for publicity.