Samuel D wrote:thelawnet wrote:Tbh if I do 100km on the road in England my knees will feel it a bit, but the point is more that the fatigue is greater in the heat so any perceived tiredness in various limbs is greater and hence more time is required to rest.
Depends on the person to a large extent. I go better the warmer it gets until well over 30°C. The greatly reduced resistance to cycling at higher temperatures and higher humidities (for a list of reasons) mean less power is needed for a given speed, so even though working at a given power may be harder, you don’t need to work as hard. For these reasons Bradley Wiggins had the velodrome climate set to tropical for his hour record. Outdoors the difference is even greater because we need bulky winter clothing in the winter, which further harms aerodynamics.
I deal with people doing walking in the jungle in Indonesia. The temperature is less than 30 C, but at lot of people are completely wiped out, despite having walked 100s of miles in Peru or whatever. Admittedly some of this is due to lack of grip - Westerners tend to cope poorly with slippery surfaces, but primarily it's a function of very high humidity.
Cycling might be slightly different, but the problems with cycling IME are the fluid loss, which is about 4x faster than in tropical weather than in freezing conditions, and the sun - around noon, plus or minus a few hours, the heat & direct sunshine will wipe you out very quickly.
I don't think aerodynamics really come into things in that there's no real reason you would cycle at the same speed in the tropics as you would in the English winter - if you are suffering more air resistance (and this is not necessarily the case, unless your hot weather clothes are suitably tight), then you can simply cycle slower - a given amount of effort is a given amount of effort, that one results in more distance because of aero clothing is not really the issue.
