Too many to list, most of which no normal person has ever heard of, but basically all muscles responsible for neck extension. They may have names like transversospinalis, semispinalis, and multifidus.
Yes it could, but usually people will take a break at the computer before it affects them. I'm 38 and have been programming for 20+ years without issue, my posture is sort of leaning back in the chair, definitely not leaning forward with heard forward.
Aside from being super obvious, it's the easiest thing to do, but also brings no value. Is it helpful for software engineers to just "stop being in front of the computer" when faced with RSI? How are they going to feed their family? Same for pro riders or any other professional people who can't "just stop". Pushing the limits has value in that sense.
But it can also be an intrinsic goal. These people are out there to push themselves beyond any previous limits. It really does help you discover things about yourself and your body in ways not many other things do. The sense of achievement and the memories created are priceless, but also helps you put so many other things in perspective with your newly minted experience.
I find it very defeatist and boring to say "just quit" when faced with difficulties.
I see people who overexert themselves in sports not too dissimilar from drug addicts. They are coping with some internal issue by forcing their bodies to produce endorphins & adrenaline, to the point of giving themselves diseases like this one mentioned. They need professional help and take more time to recover.
It depends on the local culture. You've gotta be pretty dedicated to ride a bike in the metro near me on some streets, because the layout isn't very friendly to bikers.
Those that do seem to rarely obey traffic laws- the number of near-miss incidents alone caused by bicyclists who run red lights or weave in and out of lanes, up onto sidewalks, then back down into traffic is too damn high, to borrow a meme.
The city would be a whole lot better off somewhere in the middle- more room for dedicated biking, and more enforcement of safe behavior.
It's not just the roads either, unfortunately. There's a shared walking and bicycling path that runs around a lake in the city. It's fairly popular, but I've never been more than twice because I find walking there is unpleasant. You can only get nearly clipped by bikers flying past, not staying in their lane, just so many times.
To be quite honest, it is very useful for cyclists to behave this way when they have to constantly fight traffic because it makes drivers give them a wider berth. You don't know what that bike's about to do, so you stay the fuck away instead of blazing by too close.
On the other hand, people who can't bother to get a bell for their bike and zoom past pedestrians are dickheads.
Honestly no bike belongs mixing with pedestrians any more than any other vehicle bell or no bell. A pedestrian is meandering along at 1-3MPH a bike is comparatively racing at 10-20.
Even at only 10MPH you are closing on a slow walker by at least 13 feet per second. If they notice you 60 feet behind they have less than 5 seconds to react. If they don't notice you and you don't maneuver you'll hit them. If you maneuver and they also try to get out of the way you might still hit them.
I've had multiple bikes zip by with very little space where a slight step to the side would have let to disaster. Honestly anyone caught biking on the sidewalk ought to have their equipment impounded and sold.
It's legal in only half the country and its stupid everywhere.
"The overall crash rate for cyclists was 0.29 per 1000 cycled kilometres and 6.1 per 1000 cycled hours. The crash rate for cyclists riding on pedestrian paths was 26.4 per 1000 h, which was considerably greater than other road environments. For example, the risk was 8.8 on shared pedestrian and bicycle paths, 5.8 on cycle lanes and 4.7 on roads."
I understand it may be preferable from the cyclists perspective to injure a pedestrian rather than risk getting hit by a car but your unilaterally risking them to procure a benefit for your self. Morally you are fucking them.
Furthermore some are more vulnerable to serious or permanent injury than others and they don't have an option not to be on a sidewalk especially in the city.
If you have access to a car and are cycling for your health or to achieve a warm fuzzy for saving the earth and hypothetical and mostly fictional people while actually risking, injuring, or killing existing people because actually biking on the street is too dangerous you should probably bike on the street like an adult or turn the key in your car.
> The crash rate for cyclists riding on pedestrian paths was 26.4 per 1000 h
I'm amazed that whoever cooked up this figure is sure it isn't 26.3 or 26.5.
(I suspect that riding on the sidewalk is unsafe, at least serious riding by grownups; not four-year-olds on kid bikes. I just don't believe there is any way to obtain this sort of figure.)
It clearly states that in the dataset they were studying the crash rate on pedestrian paths was 26.4 per 1000 h.
That’s just a simple fact, not a “cooked up figure”.
> I just don't believe there is any way to obtain this sort of figure
Pretty sure an elementary school student could figure out how to obtain this sort of figure.
There is no way to gather such a data set. There is no mass surveillence system which tracks where cyclists are cycling, and how many hours.
Let's look at just the sidewalk versus road issue: if you could surreptitiously place GPS tags on random cyclists, the GPS system does not have the accuracy to tell whether the cyclist is on the sidewalk or road.
Are you ok? If you click the link, you will find out exactly how the dataset was gathered. I have a hard time believing that a person capable of navigating to HN and producing somewhat coherent sentences is too stupid to figure this out.
That particular figure is from a referenced paper by a R. G. Poulos (at al), whose data comes from self-reporting.
"This paper examines self-reported prospectively collected data from 2038 adult transport and recreational cyclists from New South Wales (Australia) to determine exposure-based incident crash and injury rates."
This is not an acceptable way to speak here. When you find yourself adding emotional content including insults before your statements take a breath and delete everything but the factual statements. For example you could have simply said
"If you click the link, you will find out exactly how the dataset was gathered"
It would have added the same value without degrading the conversation or being rude.
That is not clear at all. They might simply disagree with the methodology and that is a legit topic to discuss. More importantly if you actually think he is trolling the best route to go is to disengage and downvote. This doesn't distract from the discussion or degrade the discussion into name calling.
Also hacker news rules are to respond to the most charitable interpretation of the users point. Assume they are disagreeing in good faith and engage with the topic or disengage and down vote if you feel the users contribution is negative.
If you ride on a sidewalk, it's harder for cars which approach from side streets, alleys and driveways to see you.
Doubly so if you ride opposite to the traffic direction, thinking that it's okay because you're off the road; drivers don't expect something to be coming down the sidewalk at 20-30km/h from the wrong direction, where less of their attention is focused.
I don't agree that you should intentionally endanger the safety and lives of others to get some extra elbow room.
The most important thing you can do on a road (aside from situational awareness) is be predictable- that others have an idea of what you're going to do.
If you're behaving erratically or crossing into pedestrian crosswalks so it doesn't look quite so much like you're running a red light, you're seriously increasing the odds of colliding with a vehicle or person.
If the road is allowed for bicycles, the cars have to take care not to run them over. Most roads are perfectly safe for bicycles, it's the cars that isn't safe for them. Best is to plan a city so you can bicycle wherever you need to, this leads to less cars in the city which is good for you that need your car to get home.
You find them in any sport. Weightlifting is another one that's easy to see. Go to any gym for a few weeks, you will pretty quickly identify a handful of people who seem to live there.
Being a low-impact endurance sport means that cycling is conducive to really large training volumes relative to other sports. I recall reading that pro cyclists will spend 30+ hours a week on the bike.
Honestly after a week or two riding a bike you will get to that point. You crank out 30 miles in two hours and you will go "well that felt like a jog lets do another 30 miles right now"
30+ hours a week? Did you read that right? To put it in perspective, Jonas Vingegaard averaged well below 30 hours a week at the Tour de France this year. (He rode at a pretty impossible pace, but still… it’s the Tour de France!) That would be an enormous amount of time for anyone to spend on a bike - especially anyone with a full time job and other obligations to attend to.
I think 4+ hours per day isn't too bad. I cycle 2-3 hours per day and I'm not even a professional by any means.
The Tour de France isn't really useful for this comparison, as the riders have to perform at top speeds for several weeks so the riders have to not overdo it and risk not being able to perform well in the following days.
Does your 2-3 hours per day average include rest days and HIIT workouts? I think when you factor those in, 30+ hours a week really is a lot of cycling. And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.
To be clear I am not saying that the average person couldn’t build up to 30+ hours a week of cycling. Much the opposite - the point of my initial post was that it’s relatively easy to rack up long hours on a bike, especially if you go at a slow pace. But rather that most people do not have the time or the motivation to spend that many hours on a bike, unless they race professionally.
Looking through Strava, there is nobody in my area who has averaged more than 15 hours a week over the last 4 weeks. My weekly average is well below that. Do you log your workouts in Strava or some other app? What is your actual weekly average time spent?
I think the TdF comparison is useful because it gives a rough idea of the sort of distance you can cover in 30 hours/week. Something on the order of 3000 km per month, which again I just don’t ever see any amateur riders doing in my area.
If you’re really riding that much, or even half of that, then kudos to you. I would love to be able to put in those kinds of numbers. But I still think it’s really rare for amateurs, and requires an obsessive dedication to the hobby.
> And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.
Yeah, of course not. I didn't catch that part.
I don't use a tracking app, but I pretty much always take the same route to some mountains. Getting there takes around 45-50min. Then there's an ~800m climb with up to 20% incline. How long that takes me really depends on my form that day, and I don't really care about the competitive aspect. On some days I'll cycle a bit deeper into the mountains to get to the next peak, but that's really stretching it and I'd usually need to bring some extra calories (I do this on an empty stomach usually).
Well I was commenting more on the very large training volume versus 30 hours a week. For running, most people out of shape get gassed and probably puke in about 5 minutes running around the block, and when you are in great running shape its not like you are really running for hours either unless you are endurance training. With biking, you end up with the endurance to ride for an hour or two or longer in one stint pretty fast because its such an efficient vehicle. If the goal is to burn calories before work, a bike is pretty sucky for that unless you are doing hill sprints because its going to take too long compared to running or other activities that can burn the same calories in a fraction of the time.
Enormous? It doesn't sound like that much. Any cycling commuter probably spends at least 5 hours a week on a bike, and that's just a regular person. Throw in a weekend ride and that's 10 hours. Obviously, 30 is 3 times 10, but we're talking about endurance athletes here, compared to regular people just going to work and getting groceries.
According to this article, pros typically train 20-30 hours per week, and will only typically do 30+ hours per week early in the season when building up their aerobic base.
So even the top world tour cyclists are only doing 30+ hours per week for a fraction of the year. Compare that to professional marathon runners who are probably doing roughly 15 hrs/week at their peak. It's a lot... seriously.
Just try it out biking and see how far you get before you feel absolutely cooked, you'd be surprised at how much mileage you just covered. Charity bike rides usually have the lowest mileage at like 15-20 miles or so and you can do that in any shape, they advertise that distance route as such, then they might have a 50 mile one that does take some training and will probably leave you cooked, then the more serious ones.
I used to cycle to work (about 3 miles away from my place) and after 6 months I still felt absolutely cooked after the uphill trip back, and the inclination wasn't even that accentuated.
So unless you live in a cold and flat-as-a-pancake area there's really no way to classify 15 miles as easy for anyone but seriously fit people. Even then, it's not something a non-athlete (amateur or otherwise) can just pick up in two weeks.
i think it's more than that. i see two major groups, addicts and users.
the addicts _must_ ride every day, the ride is a major mental and physical block to them feeling good.
the users ride to burn out anxious energy, it doesn't need to be daily, and you focus on sustainable riding so that your coping mechanism doesn't stop working.
i've been in both groups, and tend toward the second now a days. my uncle is in his 60s and his "ideal" day is wake up a 5am, ride till noon, eat one meal, go to bed. his kids recognized this and a few have become users while a few are addicted to it.
I'm sure there's some truth to this but I don't think that is what is happening in this case. From what I can gather, this is about people who trained for a goal, and during the event an unexpected "weak link" in the chain gave out so they found a mechanical solution.
I'm sure if most of them had gotten this during training, they would have taken the time to recover.
I‘m not really sure there’s any meaningful distinction to be made? Like sport, billions of people use drugs for their health every day without becoming addicted. And like sport, the addicts are only a small minority.
> Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.
I would argue this, as ex. medical cannabis licences are becoming more common, not to mention all the drugs that are prescribed and used healthily/responsibly (not to say all prescribed drugs are properly used).
Caffeine is actually pretty unsafe as the margin between effective dose and lethal dose (usually stated at around 5 grams) is only 100x of a 50mg dose. The margin between a cup of coffee and a lethal dose can be less, like 50x.
Much safer than heroin, but a deadly poison compared to e.g. LSD.
And coffee is not just caffeine like tobacco smoke is not just nicotine.
"It's dangerous to drink 7 pots of coffee in a row" is something that I would still qualify under "incredibly safe". The human stomach can't even hold that much liquid.
Please, when you make giant claims at least do us the courtesy of explaining why you think what you think. It comes across as opinionated pseudoscience otherwise.
We glorify grit and celebrate toughness. My view is consequently people now try to tough their way through something they are simply not trained for, up to & beyond self-destruction. They have come to think grit is the key, when in reality it’s training + grit.
Ironically, it’s easier to ruin your body for an afternoon than to train diligently for years, so the problem has persisted.
Absolutely. It's common to be reminded of one's failure to the tune of, "you didn't try hard enough." For some people, myself included, the response it to break themselves during the next attempt.
Michael Shermer occasionally refers to his experiences with Race Across America on his podcast and for him it seems more to do with personal drive and pushing himself to go further, longer and faster. It's also community and being a part of something special and bigger than yourself rather than being an adrenaline junky.
My immediate reaction was that the creepy thing is not the condition itself, but the mindset to duct-tape a PVC pipe to their heads just so they can keep cycling.
Reminds me of another comment today elsewhere in HN citing the classic "the spirit is strong but the flesh is weak."
I find it somewhat horrifying. The clearest indication to stop something is for the body to literarily give up... And then to jury rig something to go beyond what can be expected.
And it’s not even like it happened near the end of the race and he decided to power through it, which would be more understandable. It happened 1000 miles into the race, with 2000 miles left to go! I cannot even imagine making the decision to continue on at that point.
All around training is very important if you want to avoid injury, particularly if you're going to do things like try to ride 1,000 miles in one push. For this condition in particular, there are plenty of exercises one could do. These look good.
Most people assume the only goal of training is to improve performance in one's particular sport, but in reality, one-sided training creates imbalances that can lead to injury, and a central goal of any training program should be all-around strength and flexibility.
I agree - weight lifting and core exercises have had huge benefits for me on longer rides. Whereas previously I would start to start to get uncomfortable at the end of 4+ hour rides with a sore neck, hands, and lower back - I have found that those symptoms have pretty gone away completely after adoption a strength training routine. It’s made what was already my favorite activity even more enjoyable.
I think a lot of cyclists are afraid to put on muscle anywhere other than their legs, for fear of gaining weight. But really those fears are unfounded, and even a small amount of weight training would help with both their speed and enjoyment of the sport.
If you only train one part of your body (and that's all a single exercise like cycling is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for injuries down the road. I've seen it a hundred times.
It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine.
Cycling basically only trains the biceps and to some extent, the back muscles. What you really want to do is train your entire body, all the major muscle groups (chest, back, abdomen, legs, shoulders and arms) at the same time, over the course of a workout. And don't forget your cardiovascular work! I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with exercise, eating right, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.
Race Across America probably should be outlawed. Like the Cannonball Express it's just dangerous ... dangerous to the riders.
And I am absolutely fascinated by it.
I had not known about it until I past a woman biking across Arizona with a support car following. When I got to the campsite (vacation with the family), I googled and determined she was participating in a race called "RAAM". I couldn't believe it was a non-stop race across the U.S. Sleep, or any kind of rest, is a liability.
I guess I had expected the race to be broken up across a dozen days or so with checkpoints and times taken and added to declare the winner by race's end. But, no, it's just crazy.
And I guess it's the thing that endears me so much to our species.
why should it be outlawed if it only affects negatively the people who willingly decide to do it?
While the cannonball express is definitely dangerous to others, if someone wants to ruin their neck cycling across the globe, be my guest who am I to say no
A counterargument could be that engaging in certain reckless behaviors will require paying higher insurance or taxes to cover the inevitable permanent disabilities. Much like smoking premiums.
True but you could make that kind of argument about a lot of things. Like literally anything that could negatively affect one's physical health. So alcohol, sugar, lack of excercise, a non-vegan diet, etc etc.
My point being that if you're going to make that argument, then effectively what you really need to do is make an argument for where specifically to draw that line, and that's a much harder argument to make.
How is that a counterargument? It seems to me that paying more for insurance is perfectly fine for anyone doing extreme activities. You pay more for travel insurance if you do something as simple as skiing (which is actually quite dangerous).
Sorry if I was unclear. My point was that personal injury can become a burden to others too: friends, family, or community may have to support someone injured badly enough. (Which is generally fine, but if folks are knowingly undertaking activities very likely to be debilitating then others may weigh in via insurance, taxes, or even laws.)
If its dangerous only to drivers, and the drivers are aware of the dangers, why should it be banned?
Some people love spending their time doing stuff that is inherently dangerous, even if it means that they might not live as long as the rest of us. And why stop them, seems like hell to be forced to live a long but unfulfilling life.
We all die in the end anyway.
Being "aware of" a risk is not enough to make it disappear. It might not be enough to even mitigate it. Why would you think that?
Also, no, most drivers are obviously not aware of the dangers. Anyone on two wheels who wants to survive treats every car driver as a dangerous psychopath until proven otherwise.
You can always accept the risk, even if you can't mitigate or avoid it you can live with it.
Why do you assume that people who are willing to drive for 8 days with around 8 hours of sleep, supported by teams are not aware that there might be some risk involved with driving a bicycle?
Who are you to moralize/legislate what people should and shouldn't be able to do with their own bodies? These people aren't harming anyone but themselves. Even if just about everyone agrees with you, no one has any reasonable claim to ownership over another's person.
Looks like they're taking reasonable precautions - following car etc. Not sure a tired cyclist is much of a danger to anyone on an open interstate. Seems rather flimsy justification really.
I generally agree with others replying that people should be allowed to harm themselves with something like RAAM if they're doing so willingly. However I'm not sure if it's ethical to support others harming themselves. Rides like RAAM have way more support staff than riders.
Doesn't refusing support carry an implicit judgment that the activity they're undertaking is somehow morally inferior? Why is any lifestyle choice superior/inferior to another? I'm not aware of any objective criteria that allow you to rank being a RAAM participant/heroin addict/workaholic/etc. in some sort of order, and draw a cutoff between what you would/wouldn't support. Perhaps you're aware of such criteria and I'm missing something? Otherwise it seems like you're just arbitrarily imposing your personal values system...
In this scenario I'm putting myself in the position of a support staff member. So in that scenario I would impose my personal beliefs on the riders that are harming themselves. Legally they should be able to do what they want. But I wouldn't want to get involved in supporting their behavior. There's a difference between withdrawing active support and providing active impedance.
If you mean I'm imposing my beliefs on the support staff from the perspective of a keyboard warrior - you're also right. But I'm not actually stopping anyone from doing anything. Just stating my opinions.
Basically if your actions cause me empathetic harm I will not involve myself in them.
I'm curious where you'd draw the line. Would you work for Sevmash? How about Purdue? What about a small business that is supporting the owners addiction? More generally, how do you determine where you would and wouldn't work? Do you have a set of rules that I can use to determine the suitability of a given venture?
Personally, I think responsibility for action terminates at the actor, and that economic transactions do not carry with them moral responsibility for the prior or future actions of the involved parties. You should be able to use those axioms to derive quite a lot actually.
> empathetic harm
I've not hear this before, can you elaborate? Surely if you don't believe that you know better for people then you have no reason to feel empathy that they're not asking for, right?
It seems like you have a simple set of rules for determining what you will and won't do, and perhaps what is right and wrong. I don't so I can't play rhetoric with you on this one.
I don't know if they're simple, but I do think everyone's ought to exist and be at least articulable if not consistent, otherwise how do we discuss anything?
Edit: I'm surprised you would dissent to support some endeavor based on your own personal beliefs, but refuse to state or elaborate on the beliefs in question.
Yeah, I was being intentionally alarmist calling for it to be outlawed – I don't actually agree with that myself. I love that people are so crazy to push themselves to the limits that they do.
I would actually like to try bike touring and dream of crossing the entire U.S. by bicycle. But RAAM sure sounds like a drag.
Radiolab did an episode profiling Jure Robič [1], a former member of the Slovenian special forces who took up ultra-endurance cycling and won RAAM 5 times. It's a mind-boggling story. Tragically, Jure was killed by a car while training in Slovenia in 2010.
I made this point elsewhere, but there are dangerous sports that many people engage in. Skiing is the example that comes to mind. Personally the people I know who ski aren't even particularly serious with the sport, but I personally know of one broken back, multiple fractures, broken limbs (and countless near misses)...should we ban that too?
I did Paris Brest Paris in 2019 (finished in 89 hours) and got Sherman’s neck for the very end. I saw other riders suffering from it, and one woman who had put her hair in a long braid and then fastened that somehow to hold up her head.
Luckily, for me, it came at the very end and I was able to finish.
Worse was that I compressed my ulnar nerve and had loss of feeling and tingling in my left arm for 6 months.
First of all congratulations for completing the Paris Brest Paris. I had a much smaller problem with a new bike. I compressed the tendon of my left thumb on a 6 hours ride (imagine a 89 hours one. ) It got too weak to open a clothespin, no chance to shift a MTB derailleur. It took one month to fully recover. I permanently solved it by raising the handlebar to transfer some load to the back. My question: do you know if some long distance riders compromise the setup of their bikes to lower the chances of those kind of physical problems?
Arguable that's not compromising the setup but in fact the correct one. Fit is critically important to something that forces you into a singular position/movement pattern for so long. Not to say the body doesn't adapt but it does have limits and nerve compression and hitting the (physical) end ranges of motion are cases where it's not so great at doing so.
I would agree. I spent a lot of time working closely with my bike shop working on fit. Many sessions over a couple years learning things about fit that you don't really notice until after your first really long ride.
Glad that worked out for you. The ulnar nerve issue is no joke. I compressed both of mine on my first 4h ride. It took 2mons to get back to guitar with special clip picks and more bike fit knowledge and strength training than I expected.
Michael Shermer, for whom this condition is named, is also a prolific science journalist: long-time columnist for Scientific American and author of several books about pseudoscience.
He's also the founder and executive director of the Skeptics Society (www.skeptic.com). He talks a bit about weird mental states he got into after cycling for extended periods in his first book about pseudoscience, "Why People Believe Weird Things".
He's not without controversy, however, having been accused of sexual assault by multiple woman, has strong right wing political opinions (not that I'm suggesting that's necessarily wrong, but it does bring him controversy), and has a weirdly supportive relationship with Deepak Chopra, an infamous pseudoscience charlatan.
I've felt neck fatigue around ~250 miles in a day. My solution is to regularly look down when it's safe to do so (not drafting).
One idea I have is a Hololens-like setup, with a camera mounted to the front of the bike to allow the cyclist to ride in a "head down" position for long stretches, preventing neck fatigue and increasing aerodynamics.
Bicyclists should just sit more upright so the neck doesn't have to be fatiqued in the first place. If the purpose of the ride is for training/health/cardio, then you should want more wind resistance rather than less. It means you get to burn the same amount of calories in less real time and you can either chose to go on and burn more calories or do with that time however you like. If you aren't racing you should be avoiding all the 1% gain type stuff anyhow because it just makes you workout needlessly longer for a huge chunk of change, if the workout is what you are going for when riding a bike.
Body aerodynamics is more like the 30% gain territory, body geometry is the single most important factor for aerodynamics.
I don't think it wise to think you know what is best for others. Longer is better cardio and needed for endurance training. Less watts wasted in air resistance just means you are riding faster. "It never gets easier, you just get faster"
They only said that if your goal in cycling is to get fit and health benefits then it makes the most sense to get a comfortable bike.
I think it makes sense to fight back against the common recommendations you get from bike communities who are obsessing about weight and efficiency. If you are seeking to get fit by riding a bike, get a heavy bike. You'll do more work and you'll get stronger.
I interpreted this, "If the purpose of the ride is for training/health/cardio", as generally assuming that this is the purpose of most any bike riding. Just a lot of assumptions going on there, some know-it-all'ism that feels common. "Oh, why is this cyclist not in the bike lane?" (Perhaps because the bike lane is full of glass, perhaps because the bike lane is in a door zone, perhaps because the bike lane is hidden from busy drive ways, there could be tons of reasons but the person zooming by assumes they know everything there is about the person that spends years in the saddle..)
So, this just kinda triggers me as arm-chair quarterbacking, it's really common and you just don't know a cyclists perspective until you've observed the conditions of shoulders at 2 feet away, and when you know statistics that intersections and turning traffic are more dangerous to cyclists than compared to riding further into the lane forcing traffic to move over to pass.
So, I believe that is just assuming way too much. For many, 'fun' is the primary reason and for many others it is simply 'transportation'.
> I think it makes sense to fight back against the common recommendations you get from bike communities who are obsessing about weight and efficiency.
That could be the case, though really depends on which community one is referring to. Not all of them obsess about weight and efficiency. At the same time, being upright vs leaned over is hardly obsessive (given that it is the single largest efficiency gain you can have). Hence, if you care at all about efficiency, you're not going to be bolt upright. For safety reasons, it can be important to match traffic speed, there all sorts of reasons to ride faster that are not just 'obsessing over weight and efficiency'.
A forward position is much faster, both in terms of aerodynamics and the muscle groups involved with the pedal stroke. It allows even a relatively unfit cyclist to ride 20mph quite easily, rather than 13-14mph.
This also means you can go further on a single ride. The purpose might be training, but you can't go very far on an upright bicycle—after 2 or 3 hours, there is quite a difference.
Sitting upright puts more pressure on the sitbones. In a forward position, you can distribute the weight among the saddle, hands, and pedals. Again, this allows for longer, more productive rides.
I ended up with a devastating sudden neck injury that seemed computer related. Had noticed when I'd go to turn my neck, occasionally it would not actually turn, and I'd hear a 'crunch' noise. No pain. One day, it did hurt, and for the next year I could not really sit or stand without feeling extreme neck fatigue after a few minutes.
10 years later I have not fully recovered. Doctors couldn't help (or see anything wrong on MRI), but said a lifetime of sitting in front of a screen 8 to 12 hours a day was probably the culprit. Solution was, unfortunately, to quit working. I'm typing this sideways laying down on a couch. If your neck starts to act funny, give it a rest!
(Building some contraption with PVC pipes as in this article had not occurred to me, but it seems like it would just lead to other muscles being overused, instead, with new injury somewhere else eventually)
Sort of. I'm not sure what muscles were being targeted, but I went to two different physical therapists who both showed me the same set of exercises.
I did not see any improvement, (the second time things briefly got worse), but I admit I get frustrated quickly, and did not stick with it long enough. I was never sure I was "doing it right."
Thought about trying again, at home, but I don't know what is safe to try. When this started, I'd bought a neck pain book (written in the early 2000's) that had example exercises. I showed the 1st physical therapist (a PhD), and he said "Oh no, don't do those exercises, we don't do those any more. That will make things worse!". So I'm leery of trying random youtube video exercises... and due to Covid, not quite ready yet to go to in-person PT again.
Yeah, there is a lot of stuff floating around. I tried 3 therapists for a similar type of ailment and none really worked, the last one was best by just guiding me slowly as you do need to “build up” back to a body functionality. For me it was walking properly (heel to toe) that slowly got me back into normalcy.
Brent brookbush is pretty good institute that helped me gain insight with a strong evidence based focus. YouTube channels tend to be copycat videos that really don’t address all the different options and modalities.
I've had similar issues and started with simply lying down and holding my head a few mm off the ground and holding for 10 - 30 seconds. You may have to begin with only a few seconds if your neck is very weak and build up very slowly.
Beyond that simply doing more exercise helped, I stopped focusing on my neck specifically after the initial stage. Swimming is great since it reduces load.
Yeah, this was actually one of the exercises I was shown, but it was explained that a key part was that I did NOT use certain muscles while doing it.
I don't remember exactly - but the idea was, if you could feel them bulge in the front of your neck as you lifted your head, you were doing it wrong - you did NOT want to use that muscle group.
(I should have taken notes when doing PT, I wish I could remember all this now)
Strengthening the muscles is definitely the answer, the only question is which muscles actually became injured and weak. PT is changing pretty fast these days so I expect it's hard to find a good one that's up to date.
As general advice, almost everyone these days has some variation of upper crossed syndrome given the way they use laptops and phones, so upper and mid lats, rotator cuff muscles and some neck stabilizers are weak, which leads to slouched posture. I can't say this is specifically the type of corrections you need, but hopefully this useful routine will help otherd avoid such problems (I'm not affiliated it's just a good video):
Changing your habit is another good idea. Standing desk/platform, 10 minute break every hour and walking around, juggling, just moving a bit.
The problem for me was that intermediate stage where the earlier practices stop providing benefit. Which is good by itself, it means the practice worked! But you also are not at a normal healthy level yet.
Working on your posterior chain becomes more important in my experience, like lunges, walking upright and heel-to-toe, and something like foundation training (look it up- really innovative)
Find a running club near you and see what PT they recommend. Even finding a gym/trainer they recommend may do wonders. They will focus more on functional strength and mobility (in my experience).
Even with a standing desk you can have issues from doing nothing but one thing for too long. I've had a PT recommend I take a break to stretch my wrists, walk around, and focus my eyes to infinity every 20 minutes or so. I bet almost no one is bothering with that; its no wonder so many people have chronic pain when they've spent their entire life being generally inflexible, sitting for long periods of time in a small handful of positions, and hardly ever walking around.
I had a similar experience getting out of the military. I had a known back injury, but nobody could tell why it was manifesting the way it was. I eventually ended up at a sleep doctor because I refused to be put on opioids but could not sleep. I was put on Gabapentin, or rather over-dosed as this use was off-label. The physical therapist noticed a change in my range, and that my back could suddenly "pop" and release tension. Three years later a chiropractor discovered the source of my sciatic nerve pain: a fractured disk that had healed over my sciatic nerve that caused all the rest of my muscles to tense up. My life is mostly normal now that I have some tools to cope with the discomfort when it creeps up, allowing me to head off any potential pain.
I guess my point in sharing this is that nerve pain can be very hard for doctors to diagnose, much less treat, but don't give up.
I had this once, in circumstances unrelated to sport.
One time I got talked into going to a club - something I don't normally do. It so happened that it was "goth night", so I figured I would spend the night headbanging.
After a few hours, when the club was almost closing up I noticed that something was off - my neck muscles felt weak. Next thing I know I'm sitting at the side of the stage with my head down, looking like a case of alcohol poisoning, and can't move.
I sat there for half an hour until I regained enough strength to at least somehow make to the exit.
Gradually it went away but I only fully recovered the next morning.
Adds to the list of reasons why not to cycle which includes erectile dysfunction from pinched pudendal nerve, and traffic accidents where you die and the car may not even notice.
You aren't going to pinch a nerve from riding the bike 30 mins to work or the store, especially considering with commuting biking you are standing up off the pedals stopped pretty frequently.
Traffic accidents sure are bad but you can identify safe routes. For example I avoid arterials and opt for those 25mph residential roads that run parallel, and those are extremely safe. The number of cyclists that have died last year in my city of some 4 million people is also about a dozen people, and its not clear whether confounding factors were involved (e.g. alcohol or drugs or lack of helmet or nonddevensive/lack of awareness biking given the not so small homeless population that rides bikes in varying states of sobriety in my city).
are you the ghost of john forester or what? blaming cycling fatalities on a mythical vilified population of homeless cyclists who you assume to not be sober instead of the traffic engineers who designed your city is both incredibly misguided and prejudiced. shame on you.
I paint a hypothetically plausible situation that could explain a lot of the incidents given what I see play out on the road surface in my city, I don't blame anyone, I just describe how there could be plenty of confounding factors that lead to a dangerous situation on the road. The numbers at the end of the day are so low. 10 per 4 million people a year does not indicate to me a trend one way or another in terms of safety to me. Again, imagine another hypothetical, maybe just some barhopping dudebros renting lime bikes while blackout drunk then getting into some tragic accident, that could throw the numbers up to 15 that year just from that one freak accident. People might go "wow deaths are up 50% this year" and start all sorts of discussions from that fact, but really this hypothetical increase could be well within the yearly variance of this metric and may not actually be a real trend. Life is bayesian.
the fundamental problem with your position is in pinning the culpability on cyclists. cyclists and pedestrians don't kill cyclists, cars do. and by extension traffic engineers.
I as a cyclist know how dangerous it is on the road when you do something irregular. At the end of the day human reaction time is what it is, the laws of physics are what they are, and doing something reckless on a 45mph road is going to lead to your death pretty easily on a bike. Defensive driving courses for example are effective because if you start practicing defensive driving, your odds of even being in a situation that might result in an accident go way down. Biking is the same way. No one is taught how to ride a bike on the road, unlike cars where you need to pass an exam with a government official sitting in the car showing you aren't wholly incompetent. People with bikes just go out and do it. That's why I see people biking the wrong way on major arterials all the time, biking at night without any lights, ignoring intersections, and generally not looking around, and people who have lights and mirrors and helmets are much more rare. The people who know how to take a dutch left turn on a bike are also unicorns, I've never see anyone else do it.
As a cyclist I see car traffic as like a constant source of death, like a rushing river leading into a waterfall, or a big grizzly bear. It must be treated with care, but with sufficient knowledge it can be made to be nearly totally safe. When I see statistics like 10 deaths a year in a city of 4 million, of course I will assume that a lot of that has to do with the fact that most bike riders have zero education on using the road with a bike and there was probably some recklessness involved with where they were choosing to ride a bike, and that the cases e.g. of people getting killed while riding in a bike lane or on a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph are so exceedingly rare in comparison that I may as well not worry about them personally ever happening to me, much like I ignore the low scale risk of death with just about anything one does in life.
i don't have much else to say other than that you're wrong and also in a morally compromised position. knowledge can't save you from the rushing river of 2 ton deathmobiles, traffic engineering (ie dutch cycling infrastructure) can.
Good thing there is an enormous list of reasons to cycle that far outweigh the downsides.
Shermer's Neck is a condition that impacts a very small percentage of cyclists, and only those who choose to participate in the most extreme of events like Race Across America or Paris-Brest-Paris.
Given a list of options of ways to achieve a goal, prefer the one which would have been most natural to a human throughout the last 100,000 years except for the last 100.
Need to eat 3,000 kcal? Beef and vegetables would be more natural than a Big Mac. Need to go somewhere 3 km away? Waking or jogging would be more natural than cycling or using the car.
In all seriousness though, it’s good to keep in mind human history and what’s natural, but unless you’re walking around barefoot on dirt paths, fasting for days at a time, and drinking unfiltered water from mountain streams, it seems kinda silly to arbitrarily draw the line there. There are plenty of modern things that work really well for humans, that may not have been natural 10,000 years ago
The paleo argument is not absolute, of course. It’s just a guideline for deciding. Drinking filtered water is a quantitative improvement over drinking stream water. Cycling is qualitatively different than walking.
Just to share some differences in preferences: I've walked a ton. Run a bunch. And now cycle.
Cycling feels like free energy, way more flowy, and far more engaging, like it's a videogame, in the sense that I'm constantly making micro-inputs for debris, cracks, choosing clean lines, scanning what's around me, etc.
Only dimension where cycling feels way more intense than walking and running are on the hill climbs, but I oddly like the pain that comes with it. Couldn't say the same for intense running efforts (of the half-marathon threshold to VO2 max variety).
Walking feels like it just takes forever. But in new cities, it's a nice way to get a feel of the various pockets and districts. And on hikes in national parks and such, you don't really have much of a choice.
> Only dimension where cycling feels way more intense than walking and running are on the hill climbs
And even hill climbs can be made relatively easy with the right gear ratio. My endurance bike has a 33T chain ring in the front, and a 36T gear in the back - so less than one to one ratio. I can get over just about any climb in my area without much exertion. It’s definitely slow going, though!
Most reasons to not cycle are not inherent to the bike. The same cannot be said about cars, they are inherently dangerous to all road users (and as a society we paper this over to make driving feel way safer than it actually is)
My libido and performance has improved 10x since getting into cycling. It's one of the major benefits of being fit. Depending where you live you can ride trails and avoid busy streets.
GCN put out a couple videos on the subject of erectile dysfunction, and according to them the research suggesting a link between the two is fairly rubbish [1]. In fact, the prevalence of erectile dysfunction and other men’s health issues is much lower than in the general population for the same age group. Reason being that erectile dysfunction is more commonly associated with heart disease, and cycling helps to reduce the risk of heart disease.
It’s just one study. And GCN is not the best source for science news, and is certainly going to be biased in favor of cycling. But I think at the very least the risk of erectile dysfunction from cycling is vastly overstated in general.
Your penis gets numb when you have a poorly fitted bike and saddle. Anyone dumb enough to continue to ride like that is welcome to take themselves out of the gene pool as far as I'm concerned.
You sit on your ischial tuberosities, not your perineum.
Michael Shermer who this was named after is quite an interesting person and his podcast is worth a listen. He generally talks to the same group of public intellectuals you see on Lex Fridman, Sam Harris, etc and often asks different questions.
I also had some neck issues when I swam a lot. I don't like to put my head under water and I don't know the front crawl, though I can do the breaststroke very quickly, even keep up with a lot of front crawl swimmers. It does take a lot more energy to do that but I did it as exercise so that was the point. I don't care about any kind of competitiveness in sport. The only reason I'd keep up with the crawl swimmers is because they tend to complain about sharing the lane otherwise.
But constantly having my neck tilted up to the 'stop' did give me an itchy and stiff neck, often lasting the day after the swim.
I hike now for exercise as I moved to a mountainous country, glad I don't have that issue anymore.
"We’re all susceptible to what our bodies tell us. When there’s a strange pain or sickness, our bodies are hinting at us that there should be something done about it," the article opens, then goes on to uncritically describe people using alarming techniques to power through with a grueling activity which has just caused a serious injury.
Spending 8 days in near-constant intense aerobic activity on 1 hour of sleep is likely to cause lifelong health repercussions. We should not be glamorizing these people.
I didn't read this article as glamorizing. At worst it's neutral to the health effects of ultraendurance athletics, and describes their consequences as "creepy" and "bizarre."
>Spending 8 days in near-constant intense aerobic activity on 1 hour of sleep is likely to cause lifelong health repercussions
the most dangerous part here is probably the chance of having an accident on that little sleep, but there's no need to be hyperbolic, there's very rarely lasting health repercussions to short term stress like this (physical at least) in healthy adults, soldiers go through similar conditions in training and during war. Sometimes for much longer. You'd be surprised how much your body can actually take. (and recover from)
As with many conditions, the root cause is posture. the neck and spine have a natural posture we're meant to use most of the time.
Competitive road cyclists' posture is completely forwards, for aerodynamics, better climbing, etc. Using it may be a useful tool in your 20s / in competition but otherwise it is wise to use an upright position, which will take the least toll and will be fastest to recover from.
Some bike setup tweaks can make a (more) upright position easier - from higher handlebars, to moving the seat forwards, to even getting a slightly shorter bike frame (since in the case of mountain bikes, they tend to be longer for greater stability).
Finally, while riding you should be looking up, at the horizon practically, not at the cockpit.
161 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadCould bad posture behind a computer cause the same problem?
By the way, Michael Shermer is quite an interesting person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
Yes it could, but usually people will take a break at the computer before it affects them. I'm 38 and have been programming for 20+ years without issue, my posture is sort of leaning back in the chair, definitely not leaning forward with heard forward.
Aside from being super obvious, it's the easiest thing to do, but also brings no value. Is it helpful for software engineers to just "stop being in front of the computer" when faced with RSI? How are they going to feed their family? Same for pro riders or any other professional people who can't "just stop". Pushing the limits has value in that sense.
But it can also be an intrinsic goal. These people are out there to push themselves beyond any previous limits. It really does help you discover things about yourself and your body in ways not many other things do. The sense of achievement and the memories created are priceless, but also helps you put so many other things in perspective with your newly minted experience.
I find it very defeatist and boring to say "just quit" when faced with difficulties.
How often are they a problem?
Also it's legal and expected
Those that do seem to rarely obey traffic laws- the number of near-miss incidents alone caused by bicyclists who run red lights or weave in and out of lanes, up onto sidewalks, then back down into traffic is too damn high, to borrow a meme.
The city would be a whole lot better off somewhere in the middle- more room for dedicated biking, and more enforcement of safe behavior.
It's not just the roads either, unfortunately. There's a shared walking and bicycling path that runs around a lake in the city. It's fairly popular, but I've never been more than twice because I find walking there is unpleasant. You can only get nearly clipped by bikers flying past, not staying in their lane, just so many times.
On the other hand, people who can't bother to get a bell for their bike and zoom past pedestrians are dickheads.
Even at only 10MPH you are closing on a slow walker by at least 13 feet per second. If they notice you 60 feet behind they have less than 5 seconds to react. If they don't notice you and you don't maneuver you'll hit them. If you maneuver and they also try to get out of the way you might still hit them.
I've had multiple bikes zip by with very little space where a slight step to the side would have let to disaster. Honestly anyone caught biking on the sidewalk ought to have their equipment impounded and sold.
"The overall crash rate for cyclists was 0.29 per 1000 cycled kilometres and 6.1 per 1000 cycled hours. The crash rate for cyclists riding on pedestrian paths was 26.4 per 1000 h, which was considerably greater than other road environments. For example, the risk was 8.8 on shared pedestrian and bicycle paths, 5.8 on cycle lanes and 4.7 on roads."
https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12544-021-00...
I understand it may be preferable from the cyclists perspective to injure a pedestrian rather than risk getting hit by a car but your unilaterally risking them to procure a benefit for your self. Morally you are fucking them.
Furthermore some are more vulnerable to serious or permanent injury than others and they don't have an option not to be on a sidewalk especially in the city.
If you have access to a car and are cycling for your health or to achieve a warm fuzzy for saving the earth and hypothetical and mostly fictional people while actually risking, injuring, or killing existing people because actually biking on the street is too dangerous you should probably bike on the street like an adult or turn the key in your car.
I'm amazed that whoever cooked up this figure is sure it isn't 26.3 or 26.5.
(I suspect that riding on the sidewalk is unsafe, at least serious riding by grownups; not four-year-olds on kid bikes. I just don't believe there is any way to obtain this sort of figure.)
> I just don't believe there is any way to obtain this sort of figure
Pretty sure an elementary school student could figure out how to obtain this sort of figure.
Let's look at just the sidewalk versus road issue: if you could surreptitiously place GPS tags on random cyclists, the GPS system does not have the accuracy to tell whether the cyclist is on the sidewalk or road.
"This paper examines self-reported prospectively collected data from 2038 adult transport and recreational cyclists from New South Wales (Australia) to determine exposure-based incident crash and injury rates."
That's just silly nonsense.
You could just jump straight to criticizing the dataset instead of pretending to not know how they could reach that figure.
"If you click the link, you will find out exactly how the dataset was gathered"
It would have added the same value without degrading the conversation or being rude.
Thank you.
Also hacker news rules are to respond to the most charitable interpretation of the users point. Assume they are disagreeing in good faith and engage with the topic or disengage and down vote if you feel the users contribution is negative.
Sure, but ignoring a clear explanation of the methodology isn’t.
> Also hacker news rules are to respond to the most charitable interpretation of the users point
The most charitable interpretation is indeed that he’s trolling and not stupid.
Doubly so if you ride opposite to the traffic direction, thinking that it's okay because you're off the road; drivers don't expect something to be coming down the sidewalk at 20-30km/h from the wrong direction, where less of their attention is focused.
The most important thing you can do on a road (aside from situational awareness) is be predictable- that others have an idea of what you're going to do.
If you're behaving erratically or crossing into pedestrian crosswalks so it doesn't look quite so much like you're running a red light, you're seriously increasing the odds of colliding with a vehicle or person.
But yes we should rebuild cities to accommodate bikes first and then see if cars still have space.
If the road is allowed for bicycles, the cars have to take care not to run them over. Most roads are perfectly safe for bicycles, it's the cars that isn't safe for them. Best is to plan a city so you can bicycle wherever you need to, this leads to less cars in the city which is good for you that need your car to get home.
Triathletes are even more crazy, though.
The Tour de France isn't really useful for this comparison, as the riders have to perform at top speeds for several weeks so the riders have to not overdo it and risk not being able to perform well in the following days.
To be clear I am not saying that the average person couldn’t build up to 30+ hours a week of cycling. Much the opposite - the point of my initial post was that it’s relatively easy to rack up long hours on a bike, especially if you go at a slow pace. But rather that most people do not have the time or the motivation to spend that many hours on a bike, unless they race professionally.
Looking through Strava, there is nobody in my area who has averaged more than 15 hours a week over the last 4 weeks. My weekly average is well below that. Do you log your workouts in Strava or some other app? What is your actual weekly average time spent?
I think the TdF comparison is useful because it gives a rough idea of the sort of distance you can cover in 30 hours/week. Something on the order of 3000 km per month, which again I just don’t ever see any amateur riders doing in my area.
If you’re really riding that much, or even half of that, then kudos to you. I would love to be able to put in those kinds of numbers. But I still think it’s really rare for amateurs, and requires an obsessive dedication to the hobby.
Yeah, of course not. I didn't catch that part.
I don't use a tracking app, but I pretty much always take the same route to some mountains. Getting there takes around 45-50min. Then there's an ~800m climb with up to 20% incline. How long that takes me really depends on my form that day, and I don't really care about the competitive aspect. On some days I'll cycle a bit deeper into the mountains to get to the next peak, but that's really stretching it and I'd usually need to bring some extra calories (I do this on an empty stomach usually).
https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/11/30/how-many-hours...
So even the top world tour cyclists are only doing 30+ hours per week for a fraction of the year. Compare that to professional marathon runners who are probably doing roughly 15 hrs/week at their peak. It's a lot... seriously.
I don't think you quite realize how uncommon your level of fitness is
So unless you live in a cold and flat-as-a-pancake area there's really no way to classify 15 miles as easy for anyone but seriously fit people. Even then, it's not something a non-athlete (amateur or otherwise) can just pick up in two weeks.
Cooooolsies...
think of it as a libation to his memory.
the addicts _must_ ride every day, the ride is a major mental and physical block to them feeling good.
the users ride to burn out anxious energy, it doesn't need to be daily, and you focus on sustainable riding so that your coping mechanism doesn't stop working.
i've been in both groups, and tend toward the second now a days. my uncle is in his 60s and his "ideal" day is wake up a 5am, ride till noon, eat one meal, go to bed. his kids recognized this and a few have become users while a few are addicted to it.
I'm sure if most of them had gotten this during training, they would have taken the time to recover.
Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.
I would argue this, as ex. medical cannabis licences are becoming more common, not to mention all the drugs that are prescribed and used healthily/responsibly (not to say all prescribed drugs are properly used).
Much safer than heroin, but a deadly poison compared to e.g. LSD.
And coffee is not just caffeine like tobacco smoke is not just nicotine.
Ironically, it’s easier to ruin your body for an afternoon than to train diligently for years, so the problem has persisted.
An extreme case here: https://server6.intermedia.ge/pictures/original/503/503371.j...
Reminds me of another comment today elsewhere in HN citing the classic "the spirit is strong but the flesh is weak."
https://www.iron-neck.com/blogs/news/best-neck-exercises-for...
Most people assume the only goal of training is to improve performance in one's particular sport, but in reality, one-sided training creates imbalances that can lead to injury, and a central goal of any training program should be all-around strength and flexibility.
I think a lot of cyclists are afraid to put on muscle anywhere other than their legs, for fear of gaining weight. But really those fears are unfounded, and even a small amount of weight training would help with both their speed and enjoyment of the sport.
It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine.
Cycling basically only trains the biceps and to some extent, the back muscles. What you really want to do is train your entire body, all the major muscle groups (chest, back, abdomen, legs, shoulders and arms) at the same time, over the course of a workout. And don't forget your cardiovascular work! I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with exercise, eating right, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.
Not trying to call cycling a full body workout, but it definitely does more than just biceps and back. What about legs? Heart? Lungs?
And I am absolutely fascinated by it.
I had not known about it until I past a woman biking across Arizona with a support car following. When I got to the campsite (vacation with the family), I googled and determined she was participating in a race called "RAAM". I couldn't believe it was a non-stop race across the U.S. Sleep, or any kind of rest, is a liability.
I guess I had expected the race to be broken up across a dozen days or so with checkpoints and times taken and added to declare the winner by race's end. But, no, it's just crazy.
And I guess it's the thing that endears me so much to our species.
While the cannonball express is definitely dangerous to others, if someone wants to ruin their neck cycling across the globe, be my guest who am I to say no
My point being that if you're going to make that argument, then effectively what you really need to do is make an argument for where specifically to draw that line, and that's a much harder argument to make.
Some people love spending their time doing stuff that is inherently dangerous, even if it means that they might not live as long as the rest of us. And why stop them, seems like hell to be forced to live a long but unfulfilling life. We all die in the end anyway.
Also, no, most drivers are obviously not aware of the dangers. Anyone on two wheels who wants to survive treats every car driver as a dangerous psychopath until proven otherwise.
Why do you assume that people who are willing to drive for 8 days with around 8 hours of sleep, supported by teams are not aware that there might be some risk involved with driving a bicycle?
If they’re driving on public roads and are sleep deprived then they are endangering others.
Rather, no one should ever, ever want to do it.
If you mean I'm imposing my beliefs on the support staff from the perspective of a keyboard warrior - you're also right. But I'm not actually stopping anyone from doing anything. Just stating my opinions.
Basically if your actions cause me empathetic harm I will not involve myself in them.
Personally, I think responsibility for action terminates at the actor, and that economic transactions do not carry with them moral responsibility for the prior or future actions of the involved parties. You should be able to use those axioms to derive quite a lot actually.
> empathetic harm
I've not hear this before, can you elaborate? Surely if you don't believe that you know better for people then you have no reason to feel empathy that they're not asking for, right?
Edit: I'm surprised you would dissent to support some endeavor based on your own personal beliefs, but refuse to state or elaborate on the beliefs in question.
I would actually like to try bike touring and dream of crossing the entire U.S. by bicycle. But RAAM sure sounds like a drag.
[1]: https://radiolab.org/episodes/91709-limits
Luckily, for me, it came at the very end and I was able to finish.
Worse was that I compressed my ulnar nerve and had loss of feeling and tingling in my left arm for 6 months.
Lots of good memories from that ride.
Even finding a diagnosis was a struggle.
He's not without controversy, however, having been accused of sexual assault by multiple woman, has strong right wing political opinions (not that I'm suggesting that's necessarily wrong, but it does bring him controversy), and has a weirdly supportive relationship with Deepak Chopra, an infamous pseudoscience charlatan.
One idea I have is a Hololens-like setup, with a camera mounted to the front of the bike to allow the cyclist to ride in a "head down" position for long stretches, preventing neck fatigue and increasing aerodynamics.
I don't think it wise to think you know what is best for others. Longer is better cardio and needed for endurance training. Less watts wasted in air resistance just means you are riding faster. "It never gets easier, you just get faster"
I think it makes sense to fight back against the common recommendations you get from bike communities who are obsessing about weight and efficiency. If you are seeking to get fit by riding a bike, get a heavy bike. You'll do more work and you'll get stronger.
So, this just kinda triggers me as arm-chair quarterbacking, it's really common and you just don't know a cyclists perspective until you've observed the conditions of shoulders at 2 feet away, and when you know statistics that intersections and turning traffic are more dangerous to cyclists than compared to riding further into the lane forcing traffic to move over to pass.
So, I believe that is just assuming way too much. For many, 'fun' is the primary reason and for many others it is simply 'transportation'.
> I think it makes sense to fight back against the common recommendations you get from bike communities who are obsessing about weight and efficiency.
That could be the case, though really depends on which community one is referring to. Not all of them obsess about weight and efficiency. At the same time, being upright vs leaned over is hardly obsessive (given that it is the single largest efficiency gain you can have). Hence, if you care at all about efficiency, you're not going to be bolt upright. For safety reasons, it can be important to match traffic speed, there all sorts of reasons to ride faster that are not just 'obsessing over weight and efficiency'.
A forward position is much faster, both in terms of aerodynamics and the muscle groups involved with the pedal stroke. It allows even a relatively unfit cyclist to ride 20mph quite easily, rather than 13-14mph.
This also means you can go further on a single ride. The purpose might be training, but you can't go very far on an upright bicycle—after 2 or 3 hours, there is quite a difference.
Sitting upright puts more pressure on the sitbones. In a forward position, you can distribute the weight among the saddle, hands, and pedals. Again, this allows for longer, more productive rides.
10 years later I have not fully recovered. Doctors couldn't help (or see anything wrong on MRI), but said a lifetime of sitting in front of a screen 8 to 12 hours a day was probably the culprit. Solution was, unfortunately, to quit working. I'm typing this sideways laying down on a couch. If your neck starts to act funny, give it a rest!
(Building some contraption with PVC pipes as in this article had not occurred to me, but it seems like it would just lead to other muscles being overused, instead, with new injury somewhere else eventually)
I did not see any improvement, (the second time things briefly got worse), but I admit I get frustrated quickly, and did not stick with it long enough. I was never sure I was "doing it right."
Thought about trying again, at home, but I don't know what is safe to try. When this started, I'd bought a neck pain book (written in the early 2000's) that had example exercises. I showed the 1st physical therapist (a PhD), and he said "Oh no, don't do those exercises, we don't do those any more. That will make things worse!". So I'm leery of trying random youtube video exercises... and due to Covid, not quite ready yet to go to in-person PT again.
Brent brookbush is pretty good institute that helped me gain insight with a strong evidence based focus. YouTube channels tend to be copycat videos that really don’t address all the different options and modalities.
Beyond that simply doing more exercise helped, I stopped focusing on my neck specifically after the initial stage. Swimming is great since it reduces load.
I don't remember exactly - but the idea was, if you could feel them bulge in the front of your neck as you lifted your head, you were doing it wrong - you did NOT want to use that muscle group.
(I should have taken notes when doing PT, I wish I could remember all this now)
As general advice, almost everyone these days has some variation of upper crossed syndrome given the way they use laptops and phones, so upper and mid lats, rotator cuff muscles and some neck stabilizers are weak, which leads to slouched posture. I can't say this is specifically the type of corrections you need, but hopefully this useful routine will help otherd avoid such problems (I'm not affiliated it's just a good video):
https://youtu.be/i1tjJGGcoYs
Changing your habit is another good idea. Standing desk/platform, 10 minute break every hour and walking around, juggling, just moving a bit.
The problem for me was that intermediate stage where the earlier practices stop providing benefit. Which is good by itself, it means the practice worked! But you also are not at a normal healthy level yet.
Working on your posterior chain becomes more important in my experience, like lunges, walking upright and heel-to-toe, and something like foundation training (look it up- really innovative)
I guess my point in sharing this is that nerve pain can be very hard for doctors to diagnose, much less treat, but don't give up.
This is different from a kinesitherapeut who uses information from doctors or imaging to make sure documented movements.
You get reimbursed for the latter but not for the former.
One time I got talked into going to a club - something I don't normally do. It so happened that it was "goth night", so I figured I would spend the night headbanging.
After a few hours, when the club was almost closing up I noticed that something was off - my neck muscles felt weak. Next thing I know I'm sitting at the side of the stage with my head down, looking like a case of alcohol poisoning, and can't move.
I sat there for half an hour until I regained enough strength to at least somehow make to the exit.
Gradually it went away but I only fully recovered the next morning.
Traffic accidents sure are bad but you can identify safe routes. For example I avoid arterials and opt for those 25mph residential roads that run parallel, and those are extremely safe. The number of cyclists that have died last year in my city of some 4 million people is also about a dozen people, and its not clear whether confounding factors were involved (e.g. alcohol or drugs or lack of helmet or nonddevensive/lack of awareness biking given the not so small homeless population that rides bikes in varying states of sobriety in my city).
As a cyclist I see car traffic as like a constant source of death, like a rushing river leading into a waterfall, or a big grizzly bear. It must be treated with care, but with sufficient knowledge it can be made to be nearly totally safe. When I see statistics like 10 deaths a year in a city of 4 million, of course I will assume that a lot of that has to do with the fact that most bike riders have zero education on using the road with a bike and there was probably some recklessness involved with where they were choosing to ride a bike, and that the cases e.g. of people getting killed while riding in a bike lane or on a residential street with a speed limit of 25 mph are so exceedingly rare in comparison that I may as well not worry about them personally ever happening to me, much like I ignore the low scale risk of death with just about anything one does in life.
i don't have much else to say other than that you're wrong and also in a morally compromised position. knowledge can't save you from the rushing river of 2 ton deathmobiles, traffic engineering (ie dutch cycling infrastructure) can.
Shermer's Neck is a condition that impacts a very small percentage of cyclists, and only those who choose to participate in the most extreme of events like Race Across America or Paris-Brest-Paris.
Need to eat 3,000 kcal? Beef and vegetables would be more natural than a Big Mac. Need to go somewhere 3 km away? Waking or jogging would be more natural than cycling or using the car.
In all seriousness though, it’s good to keep in mind human history and what’s natural, but unless you’re walking around barefoot on dirt paths, fasting for days at a time, and drinking unfiltered water from mountain streams, it seems kinda silly to arbitrarily draw the line there. There are plenty of modern things that work really well for humans, that may not have been natural 10,000 years ago
Cycling feels like free energy, way more flowy, and far more engaging, like it's a videogame, in the sense that I'm constantly making micro-inputs for debris, cracks, choosing clean lines, scanning what's around me, etc.
Only dimension where cycling feels way more intense than walking and running are on the hill climbs, but I oddly like the pain that comes with it. Couldn't say the same for intense running efforts (of the half-marathon threshold to VO2 max variety).
Walking feels like it just takes forever. But in new cities, it's a nice way to get a feel of the various pockets and districts. And on hikes in national parks and such, you don't really have much of a choice.
CYCLING BABY, YEAH.
And even hill climbs can be made relatively easy with the right gear ratio. My endurance bike has a 33T chain ring in the front, and a 36T gear in the back - so less than one to one ratio. I can get over just about any climb in my area without much exertion. It’s definitely slow going, though!
It’s just one study. And GCN is not the best source for science news, and is certainly going to be biased in favor of cycling. But I think at the very least the risk of erectile dysfunction from cycling is vastly overstated in general.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nh2WraVt4JE
But constantly having my neck tilted up to the 'stop' did give me an itchy and stiff neck, often lasting the day after the swim.
I hike now for exercise as I moved to a mountainous country, glad I don't have that issue anymore.
Spending 8 days in near-constant intense aerobic activity on 1 hour of sleep is likely to cause lifelong health repercussions. We should not be glamorizing these people.
the most dangerous part here is probably the chance of having an accident on that little sleep, but there's no need to be hyperbolic, there's very rarely lasting health repercussions to short term stress like this (physical at least) in healthy adults, soldiers go through similar conditions in training and during war. Sometimes for much longer. You'd be surprised how much your body can actually take. (and recover from)
They should look into recumbent bikes.
Competitive road cyclists' posture is completely forwards, for aerodynamics, better climbing, etc. Using it may be a useful tool in your 20s / in competition but otherwise it is wise to use an upright position, which will take the least toll and will be fastest to recover from.
Some bike setup tweaks can make a (more) upright position easier - from higher handlebars, to moving the seat forwards, to even getting a slightly shorter bike frame (since in the case of mountain bikes, they tend to be longer for greater stability).
Finally, while riding you should be looking up, at the horizon practically, not at the cockpit.