- Morning, Trainiacs.
This is gonna be a big one today.
Wholesome workout chalked full of goodness.
So you all might not have seen it,
because it was on Triathlon Canada's page,
and let's be honest.
Who pays attention to Triathlons in Canada?
I barely do.
Lionel Sanders did an interview
talking about everything that he plans
on looking into changing on his bike and you're like
why would Lionel Sanders change his bike,
He's one of the fastest cyclists in the sport?
That's what we're gonna chat about today,
right after we go through this punishment.
(fast paced, high energy dance music)
(bicycle noises)
I shouldn't have done what I just did.
So that was a two hour 25 minute ride,
and in that, after 10 minutes of warming up,
I decided to do a race just for fun.
25k race done after 55 minutes.
I was toast.
Spun out easy for about 20 minutes.
Decided, hey, that was kind of fun, let's do another race.
That was a 10k race.
I really shouldn't have done those races early on.
That was very crampy.
After that bike, I did a 10 minute run
building up to race pace, 8.5 miles per hour,
about 2.2 kilometers, 1.4 miles in 10 minutes.
Silly.
It's amateur hour here.
Alright, sauna, breakfast, clothes,
Lionel Sanders bike position.
So I don't know if you saw, but on
Triathlon Magazine Canada's YouTube channel,
they did an interview with Lionel
when he got back to the city, and they were like
so, what do you think, how'd you enjoy Oceanside?
And he's like, well super motivated to make a lot of changes
specifically to the bike.
Which might be strange because Lionel Sanders has been
putting in probably the fastest bike times
of any pro Triathlete in the world.
Now granted, there are some of the super bikers,
the Cameron Wurfs, the Andrew Starykowiczs,
which might go a little bit faster on a race here or there,
but Lionel is also able to run off of the bike.
So you're thinking, well, why would he every change?
But Lionel talks about it right here.
- [Lionel] I mean people have been telling me this
for years now, but...
I really got to start to get serious
about my equipment choices and my...
my position and all of these sorts of things.
And, looking at Yann's bike, you know, he has left nothing,
absolutely nothing to chance.
He's tested everything, he's optimized in every single
way, shape, and form, and I have to do the same now.
- So in general, Lionel's talking about
basically optimizing the entire bike for aerodynamics,
efficiency, integration, and position.
And if we look at Yann's bike versus Lionel's bike
in Oceanside, we see some really significant differences
that we'll show you right here.
Let's look at Yann's bike.
And we can see here that,
Looking at the front cockpit, there's really no parts
that seem to be bolted on.
It's all integrated.
There's a water bottle in behind this front fairing,
this here Bento box for storage of nutrition,
it's all coming right off of the cockpit.
There's nothing coming off the rear of the bike.
You can see that he does have one water bottle,
but that water bottle, I'd imagine, on this canyon frame,
actually makes it more aerodynamic because
it fills up space and you can see that it's
basically right in line with the frame.
So it takes up space and it allows that wind to,
instead of hitting the frame and then going around
and having area to basically snap back
and create turbulence, it's one area that,
with proper aerodynamics, the wind can just stick
to the side of that bike, making it nice and aerodynamic.
Lionel's bike, however, he's got a bottle coming
off of the back, he's got a flat repair kit
coming off of the back, and specifically he mentions
that he would like to take that flat repair kit
off the back, and just like Yann has done,
put that here.
That'll also then allow him to get a mount
for this bottle back here,
and place that at more of a 45 degree angle.
Now additionally, he says that he's gonna change up
this cockpit out here, and that he's just ordered
the TriRig Alpha X which, to me, I'm not very familiar with,
but just looking at it, it looks like a much more
integrated system where you can do internal cable routing,
you've got more nutrition options, instead of
this I think it's an XLAB or a Profile Design bottle
that sticks up and it's not nearly as integrated.
I was also looking at the Speedplay Aero Zero pedals
that Yann uses.
Those pedals, they're like a cup underneath that,
instead of the pedals just sticking out
and bulging off the bottom of the shoe,
there's nice aerodynamic roundness to them.
He's also talking about getting a Vision set of cranks
that are time trial specialist cranks that,
instead of the crank area in the center having holes in it,
it's flat all the way across.
And all this, he recognizes, might not necessarily instantly
make him faster on the bike, but what he says
is that he's never been in the wind tunnel before.
Garneau has taken him to a velodrome,
and you get kind of a sense of
what different changes and equipment and position
and your kit make, but it's not nearly as
like a hundred percent accurate as a wind tunnel.
Downside to a wind tunnel is that
it's $500 dollars an hour at least.
(mumbles)
A thing that might be shocking to a lot of people
is that Lionel also said that he's looking
and making some changes to his aeroposition,
to his entire bike position.
And, again, that might shock a lot of people
because they're saying like, well dude,
you've been killing it on the bike.
But I've always wondered if he was positioned
as well as possible.
Lionel says he's got a really long torso,
but because he's got a medium frame,
he can't get that seat height up high enough
to get a nice, aerodynamic position.
So I think he's gonna end up going to a smaller frame,
and let's see what the position changes are
that he mentioned that I've been looking at
for quite a while.
So this angle here-
And again, thanks to our buddy Talbot Cox for all this.
So the one thing that I've always noticed about Lionel
is that he's got a very hunched back here.
And that could be him being in too far,
it could be a lot of things, I'm not a bike fitter.
But he recognizes that
he was very scrunched up in Oceanside.
And then the next thing he wants to address
is the hip angle, and that's the angle between the torso
and the leg, and he wants to open that up wider.
And the idea is that if you open that up wider,
you're gonna be fresher for the run.
You can do that with a shorter crank,
you can do that with moving your torso up.
I doubt he's gonna do that.
However, back in the day, Yann actually said
that he brought his body up and it made him more aero.
You wouldn't think it.
So there are certainly some things that he can change
that are gonna make him an absolute monster on the bike.
He's already there, but if he can get even stronger
and be fresher for the run, whoo!
Hot damn! Lionel, you're gonna be fast.
Now the most interesting thing that I heard him say
in this interview, and he mentioned on Instagram,
is that watts are great and all.
Power is phenomenal, and the best place to do that
is on Zwift on an indoor ride
where the situation is controlled
and you can do a really purposeful workout.
But he said that he gave away a lot of free time
in Oceanside on the corners, in the technical sections,
and you can't build that on Zwift and indoors.
So, this past week, he was riding outside in some trails.
Put all this together, and the dude is gonna be
nasty for the rest of the year.
I'd like to race ya.
Alright, you know what,
I would like to ride with you for the 30 seconds that
I could hang on.
That'd be fun.
There you go, Trainiacs, another day, another video
covering Lionel Sanders, just wealth of content ideas.
Awesome. Thank you for watching.
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Now, we go to comedy show, I'm gonna have me some wings,
and a couple of laughs.
(door squeaks)