Newswise — An MSU scientist has set the bicycling world spinning by predicting that Lance Armstrong could break the one-hour cycling record by a margin that would make the record unbeatable for decades.
Reporters from Spain, Italy, England and Columbia contacted Dan Heil, a Montana State University exercise physiologist, even before his article predicting the new record was in the hands of subscribers to the European Journal of Applied Physiology.
Through the web of Internet biking enthusiasts and reporters, it also circled back to the United States and came to the attention of Lance Armstrong’s associates, who e-mailed Heil to ask for details of what his work predicted.
“The one-hour cycling record is the single most prestigious of all cycling records, at least in Europe,” says Heil. “The model I submitted to the journal predicts that Lance Armstrong will absolutely smash both one-hour records, not by a little, but by an amount that might be insurmountable for decades.”
There actually are two one-hour records, Heil said. The Union Cycliste Internationale Hour Record flattens the technological playing field so that comparisons between different cycling generations can be made. It uses bicycling technology similar to that used in 1972. The second, the Best Hour Performance record, allows riders to use the most advanced technology that is approved by the UCI at the time of the attempt. Both records are attempted in a velodrome, which is an indoor track built specifically for bicycle racing.
Heil’s model that predicts Armstrong’s performance is a set of mathematical equations that describe the physics of both the rider’s physiology and the external forces on the cycle and cyclist. Heil has contributed several of the equations to the published scientific literature, including new ones in this article that better predict the influence of body mass on the rider’s overall performance. Other equations in the model have been developed through time by other researchers.
“This paper has gotten more international press before publication than I’ve ever had,” he said. “People aren’t so much interested in the main part of the paper, which is about validating a model, as they are in the person I used as an example. Apparently I’m the first person to come up with what Lance Armstrong could do in the one-hour event.”
After last year’s record-breaking sixth win of the Tour de France, Armstrong said he would announce his future plans this March. He has said he is considering challenging the one-hour cycling record that is now held by Chris Boardman of Britain. Boardman, a time-trial specialist, set the best hour performance record of 35.0298 miles (56.375 KM) in Manchester, England, in 1996 and the hour record of 30.721 miles (49.441 KM) in the same velodrome in 2000.
“The model predicts that Armstrong could break either hour record by almost two kilometers,” Heil said.
Heil, whose own workouts include swimming, running, cross country skiing, weight lifting and cycling, said he came reluctantly to the math that is essential for his profession.
“Math has never been exceptionally easy for me, but I had questions about performance that I couldn’t understand without understanding the math,” he said. “So I taught myself to create my own models of human performance,” he said. “Now I find that it has transformed my brain. When I think of a problem, it is always first as equations or at least as a graph.”
The answers to one of those problems is now feeding world-wide speculation about what would happen if Armstrong attempts one or both of the one-hour performance records.