Does carrying ice in your hands actually cool you off enough to improve performance in hot weather?
Hot & Bothered Triathletes: Getting Steamed About “Cooling Gear”
Category: Free Speed
Get faster without trying very hard! The VeloPress Free Speed page offers easy and clever ways to get in cycling, running, swimming, and triathlon. Most of the VeloPress Free Speed stories come from FASTER: Demystifying the Science of Triathlon Speed by Jim Gourley.
Hot & Bothered Triathletes: Heat’s Toll on the Athlete’s Body
Now we’re going to take a closer look at how much heat you naturally produce and expel during exercise. That will serve as our basis of comparison when determining if particular types of cooling garments actually live up to expectations.
Hot & Bothered Triathletes: Beat that Heat!
All other forces being equal, nothing slows an athlete down more than the gradual buildup of heat in the body. To avoid overheating (and death!), the body has a variety of ways to dissipate heat during exercise. And here they are.
Hot & Bothered Triathletes: An Introduction to Heat Transfer
How does the body deal with heat during a race?
Ask the Scientist: To Glide or Not to Glide, That Is the Question
I know there are many different schools of thought on “the best way” to swim. I just have a technical question about one portion of the swim stroke–the glide. Or more precisely, “to glide or not to glide” is the question.
Evil Twins, Triathlon’s Draft Box, and Race Day Interval Workouts
Physicist Jim Gourley examines triathlon’s drafting rules – and finds that they could use improvement.
Thinking Inside a Smaller Box: How Current No-Draft Rules Penalize Honest Triathletes
Physicist Jim Gourley examines triathlon’s drafting rules – and finds that they could use improvement.
Cheating the Wind: The Physics of Draft-Legal Racing
How much of a difference does drafting make in draft-legal triathlons?
How Running Is Like Angry Birds
Explaining running efficiency to someone without getting lost in horizontal and vertical forces is tough. Then it occurred to me that there’s already an almost universally understood example of how changing the magnitude of our vertical and horizontal force components changes efficiency of movement. It’s everyone’s favorite smartphone game, Angry Birds.
Ask the Scientist: How much slower are clip-on aerobars?
How much slower are clip-on aerobars for triathlon bikes?
Good art can illustrate complicated concepts.
The illustrations you see in the book will help you visualize some of the more sophisticated topics and clarify what they mean to you as an athlete. Ironically, as simple as those illustrations make things for you, actually creating them was a challenging process that required several iterations.
Ask the Scientist: Am I a hopeless swimmer?
A reader asks, “I’ve spent 6 years trying to swim faster and I can’t get below 2:00 100s. Am I hopeless?” Jim Gourley replies, “Best. Question. EVER.” See why.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched: Strategy, Superstition and Theory in Triathlon
A race strategy that includes predictions about what the elements are going to do has a better chance of surviving that first punch. It’s certainly more helpful than a gremlin bell.
Certainty, or: Why Science Informs But Proves Nothing
Their importance and prevalence in the book is best highlighted by a phrase that never appears—”scientifically proven.” There is a very good reason for this, and for why you should always be wary any time you see them in a product advertisement. There is no such thing as “scientifically proven.”
Breaking the Law of Averages, Part 3: Let it ride or let ‘er rip?
When riding your bike, your finish time will improve if you push harder into the wind and relax when you go with it. The trick is knowing just how much harder you can push and how much to relax…
Breaking the Law of Averages, Part 2: Wherever the wind may blow, you probably lose
We all like to think that we can buy gear or come up with a strategy to “cheat the wind.” But the math shows that you cannot make up time lost riding into the wind by riding faster with the wind at your back. See why.
Breaking the Law of Averages, Part 1: Why it’s so difficult to “even out” your speed
Riding your bike down a hill really fast does not make up for the time you lost while pedaling slowly up the other side. Here’s why.
Why a book on the science of triathlon?
FASTER by Jim GourleyThere are plenty of books out there about triathlon training plans, nutrition, skills and mental toughness, but nothing about the science and physics that go into the sport of triathlon. To my knowledge, FASTER is the first book on the physics of triathlon.