tassava wrote:
A friend and I - both citizen racers and fans of World Cup XC skiing -
have started a little project to offer some commentary and analysis on
the elite racing scene - a little more in-depth than what, for
instance, Fasterskier.com does. So far we've done a podcast recapping
the 2007-2008 season, and he's added two great posts analyzing Lukas
Bauer's dominance last year and comparing skiing and cycling power
outputs.

You can find it at http://nordiccommentaryproject.blogspot.com/

I liked the power budget calculations, but I believe the friction
numbers might severely understate the case:

As the article noted, it was a warm day, and they were skiing a steep
uphill, right?

In such conditions the actual friction almost certainly increase when
you need to angle the skis more and push off harder, i.e. the 0.025
value is too optimistic.

Secondly, the base power calculation assumes that all energy output
actually is used in the direction of travel, to gain altitude.

This might be a reasonable assumption for a fit cyclist, sitting on his
seat, but not for a skier, no matter how good his technique.

I.e. I'm pretty certain the article numbers are most useful as an
absolute minimum value, but the real energy usage might have been
significantly higher.

Terje
--
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"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"