Unicon 14: Marathon results

tholub wrote:
Come on, Ken, give credit where it's due. Chuck has demolished the
fastest riders in the world four times in a row. (RTL TT and
criterium, UNICON 10k and marathon). He beat Sam and Dustin by almost
8 minutes in the marathon. Eight minutes! Maybe, if those guys got
Schlumpf 36ers and trained on them for six months or so, they might be
able to compete with Chuck. I expect they're going to try, and then
we'll have something to talk about. But to dismiss Chuck's
accomplishment as somehow based on the equipment rather than his own
strength is really lame. There were at least five other geared 36ers
in the marathon, two of whom came from the winning Ride The Lobster
team, and Chuck beat them all by over three minutes. Chuck beat them
because he's freaking fast.



Chuck blew me away yesterday, and I was on a 29" Schlumpf. Don't get
me wrong, Chuck is truly amazing. But so is Sam and Dustin. I haven't
seen them compete on the same equipment yet though. Until everyone is
riding the same equipment, I don't think it can be a fair comparison.


--
GizmoDuck

The Uninam Tour 2008.....Hanoi to Saigon!!! www.uninam.net

The SINZ Unicycle Tour 2007....South Island, New Zealand
www.sinzuni.org

The Induni Unicycle Tour 2009. Unicycle Tour of India. Email me for
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peter.bier wrote:
O

I did some back of the envelope calculations and if Ken sees a similar
increase in speed, he would have shaved more than 6 and a half minutes
off his marathon time, putting him about 5 minutes ahead of Chuck!




Peter,

Back of the envelope calculations are just that. There is no way of
knowing without actually doing it in practice. I probably don't have
the legs to push such a big gear. Chuck is a really powerful rider...he
did thrash the entire marathon field yesterday, and there were quite a
few Schlumpfs there.

The GUNIs will make unicycling more like bikes. If you stuck Lance
Armstrong on a unicycle 5yrs ago, even with practice, he may or may not
be very fast. Because it was about how fast you could pedal without
falling off. How many 12yr old kids in Japan could cruise at 23km/hr
on a 24? Probably quite a few.

Now with bigger gears, it is definitely more fitness and strength
biased. Really strong riders will have an advantage over the spinners.


--
GizmoDuck

The Uninam Tour 2008.....Hanoi to Saigon!!! www.uninam.net

The SINZ Unicycle Tour 2007....South Island, New Zealand
www.sinzuni.org

The Induni Unicycle Tour 2009. Unicycle Tour of India. Email me for
details.
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Oops. I meant to post this here, not in the 10k.

Cool. The top times are coming in for geared unicycles, now. People are
getting good at riding them.


GizmoDuck wrote:

I think one of the most impressive rides of the day was Dustin and Sams
on the fixed gear, but there is no way of comparing our rides with
theirs.




Technically, all of the unicycles in the race were fixed wheel or fixed
gear. The definition of fixed wheel or fixed gear is that they are
direct drive and missing a freewheel feature. There are almost no
freewheeling unicycles around.

Consult the late, great 'Sheldon Brown'
(http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_e-f.html) under fixed gear.


--
harper

-Greg Harper

*jc is the only main man. there can be no other.*

"Natural logs are what you ride on a Mun'e'." - kevinalexandersmith
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