Working in Movement

Bicyclist Lance Armstrong is kicking butt again in the Tour de France and will probably win it for the sixth straight time. A nine mile time trial straight up a steep mountain this week posed no threat to Armstrong's quest for the win: he won it handily, even passing a guy who had started two minutes before him! As I watched this, I remarked to myself something like "this guy is a machine." I had meant his physical conditioning, made even more remarkable for a cancer survivor like Armstrong. Although his conditioning is second to none, the steadiness of his remarkable pedaling performance may owe more to technique and coordination than to a world class circulatory system.

Swimming coach Terry Laughin explains in Why Technique Matters More Than Fitness, making the point that water offers so much resistance to swimming that conditioning alone can't overcome it.

Water is so effective at robbing us of efficiency that scientists estimate that even world-class swimmers are probably only about 9 percent mechanically efficient--91 of every 100 calories being robbed by water drag and the difficulty of pushing a hand against liquid. The novice swimmer may be only 1 or 2 percent efficient, as many as 99 of every 100 calories being stolen by the water

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Because stroke efficiency is such a big factor, the great performances of world-class swimmers are approximately 70 percent due to the efficiency, economy and coordination of their body position and stroking movements, and only 30 percent a factor of their power and physical conditioning.

Granted, swimming is not cycling. But the mountain time trial offered it's more than its share of drag on the efforts of the guys pedaling like hell to cross the finish line. Armstrong's technique of holding intense pedaling cadences against such resistances offers him much in the way of "efficiency, economy and coordination."

So maybe my metaphor of Armstrong as a machine was a bit flawed. Originally I had thought of the machine in the John Henry-way--brute force because of physical conditioning. But after read Lauglin's article, I'm willing to extend the metaphor well beyond steel-driving machine to something truly complex and magnificent. And fun to watch, too.