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About David's work with Profile Design - written by SlowTwitch

https://www.slowtwitch.com/Pro... DAN EMPFIELDThu Jun 09 2022 David is the head of R&D at Profile Design and if you see something clever from this company there’s a very good chance it incubated in David’s brain. He’s one of the people in our industry whose judgment I trust at least as much as my own, and I know that when I ask him a question I’ll get a more fully fleshed answer than I could come up with on my own.David lives in New Zealand with his wife Nicky and their two daughters. He...

Tokyo Olympics Triathlon Mixed Team Relay Analysis

Time to dive into the results from the Olympic events last week - someone needs to cover the numbers that the news outlets gloss over.I'll cover the individual events seperately to the MTR - they were going to be together but I started digging into the MTR with the consequence that there is quite a lot of information just for that event....

IMNZ Results Analysis

This analysis isn't late - I just wanted to allow sufficient recovery time for athletes to be prepared to think about IM again... I've updated the IMNZ results files and generated a bunch of new comparisons for your edification. Or as a sleep aid - depends on how you feel about statistics. At the basic level of analysis, the average time this year was faster than the last few years:...

IM NZ 2021 Forecast

The weather for IMNZ on Saturday is looking promising, if not necessarily super fast. I suspect the limited daylight hours will cause more consternation than the environmental conditions....

Proportional Crank Length

With FSA releasing cranks shorter than 165mm we finally have one of the large manufacturers paying attention to the requests from bike fitters for a better range of options. Which is great news for bike fitters that care about doing a good job and consumers that wish to be more comfortable, particularly on their Tri/TT bikes....

Speed Theory Athlete About To Suffer Again

"We're all too used to comfort, it's boring." Hayden is no stranger to spending days on end on a bike, having completed his first ultracycling event amidst the COVID ridden 2020 where he placed second overall. Badlands 2020, a 725km bikepacking off-road adventure, covering 15,000m of elevation and crossing the only official deserts in mainland Europe, was how Hayden got hooked on ultracycling.  Taking just over 52 hours to complete and not without a multitude of obstacles to tackle alo...

Tauranga Half Analysis

Several records were set this year so it was clearly a fast edition of the race. There were a number of factors at play, which I shall delve into (of course).Lets start by looking at the average splits over the years:...

New Tauranga Half Course

The Tauranga Half offers a new course this year - taking advantage of the new motorway to lessen the amount of time we spend annoying local residents. There has been discussion of whether the new course will be faster or slower than the old. Unfortunately my analysis shows that theoretically it will only be faster if it is shorter or if the road surface is significantly better than I recall. There is a false flat (according to mapping software) on the way to the far turn that saps about 30s...

Everesting Preparation

If we ignore all the less pleasant things that have happened and focus on cycling, one might say that 2020 has been the year of Everesting. The first half of the year saw a number of professional and keen amateur riders taking on the challenge in the absence of racing. If you haven't heard of Everesting, it is defined as climbing the same total elevation as the height of Mt Everest in a single ride. Hells 500 are the keepers of this peculiar faith. The rush of elite riders into the game has se...

Taupo Half 2013 Results Analysis

Graham O’Grady and Candice Hammond dominated the 2013 edition of the Taupo Half with times close to the best ever achieved on the course. From a statistical viewpoint it’s what happened behind them that is most interesting – allowing us to draw conclusions about the relative difficulty compared to previous years.Both the finish times and conditions initially point at a fast day and further analysis shows that it was nearly the fastest day we’ve ever had for the current cou...

Fuji Track Elite

Fuji is one of the few brands in recent years to have committed to developing a new carbon track frame – the Fuji Track Elite. It’s a very nice addition to the market – sizing, features & price are all positives compared to competing products. I built one up for the first time so had an opportunity to take some photos and measurements. The Frame shown is the 49cm, it weighed in at 1499g, with 456g for the uncut fork and 278g for the uncut seatpost. The fork steerer is 4g per 10mm and ...

Ironman Kona 2013 Preliminary Analysis

As most who follow Long Distance Triathlon will realise – the Hawaiian Ironman was raced yesterday. The conditions were unusually mild and the racing was particularly fierce, which led to some notable meltdowns and good material for analysis.For starters I’m going to look at ‘same athlete’ analysis to compare 2013 to 2012 performances. As the full results are not available at this point I’ve just done a quick run through with the Pro results to establish a comparison to last year....

Profile 78/TwentyFour Wheels

Profile Design have been beavering away developing new race wheels for the last couple of years. I was fortunate enough to receive one of the first production sets in February prior to the Global release and have spent quite a bit of time on them.Even better – I’ve got aero data so I can detail exactly how well they perform (because I’m obviously not going to write a review just based on fluffy concepts like ‘feel’). Attempt to show the rim curvatureFirstly – in the interests of...

Tour de France: Observations from Stages 4 & 5

You would think that there would be some minutiae of equipment choice from the TTT that I could have picked to pieces. But I couldn’t see anything that would form a compelling argument for a different result if different equipment was used.So I’m just going to list a few of the things I’ve noticed over the last couple of stages Stage 4: Nice Team Time Trial One of my favourite events to watch, though I do feel that the broadcast would be improved by having the speed in the top left corner ...

Tour de France Stage 3 Equipment Effect

Stage 3 of the 2013 Tour de France was another exciting finish (does anyone else feel their heart rate jump watching the final kilometre?).Once again there are small and perhaps crucial differences in equipment that may have made the difference between the victor and the rather grumpy rider he defeated. So I’ll break out the calculator once more. Simon Gerrans pulled off a beautifully executed sprint – pushing Peter Sagan into second for a second day running.As shown in t...

Tour de France Stage 2 Equipment Effect

The finale of the 2013 Tour de France Stage 2 was gripping, to say the least. It’s fairly rare to see a late break succeed.In these situations the topic of equipment choice is highlighted more sharply than in a standard bunch gallop where the standard of lead out and strength of the sprinters kick are dominant factors. So I’ve done some quick analysis of the last mile (1.6km) of the race. It’s well established that I have some slightly OCD tendencies, so it should be no (or not much of a) ...

New Triathlon/TT Bike Releases - Cervelo, Fuji, Pinarello

There have been some interesting new bikes announced recently, as usual I have an opinion about such things so have jotted down a few observations.In ascending order of interest…. Pinarello BolidePinarello have released a successor to the Graal which is much more aesthetically pleasing. And they seem to have paid attention to the rest of the industry in adopting BB86, hidden brakes (using the 30yr old Shimano AX principles), offering lower bottle placement and managing airflow. Of pa...

New Mavic CXR60 Wheels

Following on from the release of the CXR80 wheels Mavic have brought the technology to both a shallower depth and a clincher model. Given that they’re 60mm deep they’ve logically named them the Mavic CXR60. Additionally they’ve released some really interesting supporting data.So I’m also going to discuss the supporting data as it adds useful information to the body of publicly available knowledge. As well as taking an holistic approach to examining the performance of the wheels...

Cervelo RCa Released

Cervelo have released a successor to their Halo road bike – the R5Ca makes way for the RCa – the Ca referring to the fact that the frames are built in California. Unfortunately the price tag that accompanies the R&D and exclusivity (only 325 made) means that discussion of this bike is for most of us an academic exercise. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting (after all – no one can afford space ships but sci-fi movies are very popular).Unlike the cycling media I’m not going to ...

Triathlete Magazine Windtunnel Testing: Part Deux

After I finished yesterdays article about Triathlete Magazines Windtunnel Testing it occurred to me that there were additional elements worth considering. So today I’ll look at the effect of different bikes at IMNZ and consider the impact of adding a water bottle to the frame – which works in the favour of the Specialized Shiv Tri. Firstly – Ironman New Zealand. Much colder and a bit hillier than Kona. Much colder and very much hillier than Florida. Also a hideous road surface.For 2011 con...

Triathlon Magazine Windtunnel Testing

Triathlete Magazine has made drag data available from a recent bout of Windtunnel testing involving the new Orbea Ordu, Specialized Shiv, Trek Speed Concept and Cervelo P5. Unfortunately the conclusions they draw from the data are rather simplistic.Happily Speedtheory is here to do the complicated analysis and then present it in a way that (hopefully) makes it meaningful for our readers… In the video shown at the link above they display a graph of the test results. So of course I hav...

Auckland Ironman 70.3 2012

I’ve added a page for the Auckland Ironman 70.3 under the Race Analysis tab – comparing the splits to the Tauranga and Taupo Halves.Also, I posted a gallery of 1000 photos from the Bike leg on Facebook – mostly trying for side on shots (often at the expense of clarity) so that viewers can evaluate their bike positions (or ask for my opinion)....

Hammer Nutrition Review

This review is in some ways a retraction. I’d never given Hammer Nutrition much consideration, for several reasons:The issues that Rebekah Keat had (claimed that contaminated Hammer supplements had led to a positive drug test)On arrival in NZ it was promptly adopted by some training groups that I felt were too eager to look for a magic pillThe thought of a multi hour bottle of Perpetuem powder was a bit nauseatingAs part of my association with the Rotorua Half Ironman, I’...

Trek Speed Concept 7.0 2013

The new range of Trek Speed Concepts finally arrived in NZ last week, allowing two of my clients to finally get some sleep (as they both wished to race on the weekend just gone).The XL model had to be special ordered so is the only one around, the small is a bit more widely available. I was pleasantly surprised by how sharp the white-green-black paint scheme looks in person – very crisp. In fact the graphics are much refined overall – not nearly as many TREK labels as previous models.As usua...

Orbea Ordu 2013

Last year Orbea suffered the indignity of having their star athlete, Craig Alexander, abandon them mid-season – breaking a life-time contract as he had discovered in the wind tunnel how much time he was losing to competitors on better bikes.Orbea have finally done something about this with the release of a new Ordu for 2013. I’ve noticed a few things so as usual will offer a view other than that of regurgitated press releases. The Orbea Ordu has never been a bike I’ve rated highly – hard...