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The Evolution of Aero

By Rick Crawford
Published: Aug. 13, 2008

I remember a hot, muggy day in Savannah, Georgia, way back in 1983. The state time trial was an event I had looked forward to for a long time. I had trained really hard for it, and always enjoyed the test against the clock. This particular year, I showed up with a secret weapon, and I planned to blow everyone away with it. The secret weapon was a first-generation funny bike. No more “Eddy Merckx style” for me.

Now this bike was super radical compared to the bike I had ridden at this TT the years prior. In those days, a TT bike was pretty much the same as a road bike. In fact, I usually rode the exact same setup in a TT that I did in a road race, and so did everyone else. Life was so simple then. But this funny bike was radically different than my road bike. It had super thin bladed down and seat tubes, a tiny little front wheel with radially laced aero spokes, and it even had aero profile handlebars. Almost everything on this bike was a one-off prototype. It looked so fast, even standing still. I had just picked it up from the builder a couple of days before, and had ridden it very little. This bike handled so differently than my road bike … it was a good thing the course was dead flat, out-and-back.

I was confident that I would win this TT with this razor-thin aero machine I had scored. But it didn’t really work out to my plans. It was a 40K, so there would be no faking it at this race. My first few miles were truly impressive. I had an Avocet cyclometer on my handlebars and I was cooking along extremely fast. A fast time on this course was anything under 54 minutes and I was aiming for something under 52 as I had gone close to 53 the year before. I was well ahead of the pace I was the year before and I was feeling good, but my race started to unravel at about mile eight. That’s when I started to feel my glutes aching and my lower back starting to rig up. By the turn-around, I was not ‘cooking’ anymore, and my body was not obeying my brain.

I pushed as hard as I could, and I can still remember how painful it was. Based on pain, I should have won because it was the most painful 40K TT I have ever done. When I finished, my entire backside was wrecked from my mid-lower back all the way to the back of my knees. My neck was cramping. When I tried to dismount the bike, my right glute seized up in a cramp so painful that I just dropped straight to the ground and writhed in agony. I was a mess. My time did not reflect the suffering I had just gone through. 55’36”. That really sucked. I felt like such a fool, showing up with my secret weapon thinking to win, and ending up barely in the top ten with a slow time and a really messed up body. I brought a funny-bike, but I wasn’t laughing. Some of my buddies thought it was so funny they nearly TT’d themselves laughing.

It didn’t take long to diagnose the problem. On that day in Savannah, there is no doubt I was the most aero guy there, I was cooking along at about 30 miles per hour for the first 15 minutes. But it was evident that my body was not trained to the radical aero position that this funny-bike put me in. I could not maintain the power I was putting out, and my muscles led a rebellion against me. I was way lower and more forward than I was accustomed to and while I was more aero, my muscles were not conditioned to this position. It was a tough lesson to learn, but simple enough to fix.

My response was to ride this machine much more and condition my body to the radical position. I gradually got accustomed to riding like this and within a few months was able to ride the funny machine very effectively. I won some TTs on this bike, and soon, there were many funny-bikes out there, and not long after that, everyone was TTing on a funny- bike.

I was also one of the first people to ride Boone Lennon’s prototype aero bars. Funny thing was you could put these bars on your regular old road bike and ride faster than everyone else on a funny-bike. The funny-bike era was soon over. Now we have even funnier bikes with funny bars and funny helmets and funny wheels too. Things have changed and will continue to do so, but what will never change is that the body must still adapt to the radical aero positions.

Nowadays, bikes are getting funnier and more aero all the time, and the rider must fold themselves up quite neatly and hide from wind every way possible. While equipment is important, you don’t want to show up with a very expensive piece of equipment and ride like a fool on it.

At the wind-tunnel in Fort Collins, we have tested a lot of riders. Robby Ketchell, our brilliant mad scientist of aerodynamics, puts clients in exactly the right position for best aerodynamics by analyzing data from wind-tunnel testing, but they won’t know what position they can actually ride fastest in until they do position optimization power tests, and undergo runway tests outdoors on their TT rigs. Clients leave the testing grounds knowing how they are most aerodynamic, how they are most powerful, and what combination of those two factors will yield their fastest TT, at least for the short term.

Once they leave with that key information, they must now train on the machine and develop the specific musculature recruited in that relatively radical position. As I learned the hard way, aerodynamics is not enough by itself … cooperation from the body is critical. That cooperation is earned through training. The TT bike does not sit all clean and pretty in the garage waiting for its day in the big race … oh no. It gets used at least a couple of times per week in both recovery rides and hard efforts to accustom the body to the position.

Aerodynamics has come a long way, and so has the equipment. It’s evolved from “Eddy Merckx style,” to incredibly sophisticated aero weaponry that goes from head to toe — including the bicycle. The TT arsenal is a very specialized set of tool these days. The body has to become a very specialized aero tool as well. It must evolve to the optimal position to find that sweet spot that yields the best performance. And realize that the sweet spot will move and further evolution will yield faster times even still. The rider’s aero evolution is never done.


Rick Crawford is Director of Coaching and COO of Colorado Premier Training. He is also the head coach for the Fort Lewis College cycling team in Durango, Colorado.