DaveC: fun with physiology...
The way your nervous system works is to recruit the least number of muscle fibres it can to do the job the brain has tasked. Every bundle of fibres is bound up in a muscle unit, with one nerve ending ready to rock'n'roll and order all the fibres to twitch.
The muscle units variously called red, slow-twitch, jogger's or Type I are recruited first, so if it's a light job, like turning a pedal when spinning at a nice 80rpm, that's the only one used. These muscle units are very well supplied by oxygen, so they can run and run, but there's not many fibres in each one, so they're a bit weedy. It's not their nerve's fault: said nerve simply doesn't have the staff to get a big job done.
If they can't supply the force, the big guns of the white, fast-twitch, sprinter's of Type II muscle units are called in. They've got around ten times the number of fibres per nerve than the reds, so when the foreman says it's time to twitch, a lot of Newtons happen. They work anaerobically, so they fatigue much quicker than the Type I snakes. If you have a huge job to do, like starting a 90" track bike from a standing start, these things will all be firing.
The ratio of marathon to sprint fibres that you have is looking a lot like a congenital and unalterable factor. I've looked at the evidence for the contrary and it's a bit wooly for my liking. I'm perfectly happy to call myself a born sprinter and not get too fussed when I can't cope on long efforts.
The flip side of the coin is that all the white/fast/TypeII guff that I was uselessly carrying around for most of yesterday was firing on all cylinders on the hills in my 63" gear, so I look a much better cyclist than I actually am.
Tom and I talked about this on the ride, as it happens. The received wisdom for distance cyclists is that they shouldn't do any strength work the way time trialists and track sprinters do, and for the above reasons, we agreed that's just nuts. You're going to get hills, and you're going to be slow on them unless you've got your squatting in.
So, DaveC, I'll show you how to squat, and you'll be grand.
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