 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today we're going to be talking about using arrow bars for gravel racing. My mission here will be to squash this notion that arrow bars are somehow uncool for gravel racing and in case you aren't aware of just how much of an advantage arrow bars are I'll be going over that as well. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training, racing, and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing experience and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general then be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video then be sure to leave it down in the comments section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. This video idea was sparked by the most recent GCN show titled is gravel riding as cool as it thinks it is? I've left the link for that video in the description below so be sure to check it out. In that video Dan and Si discuss whether or not gravel riding is becoming uncool because people are taking it too seriously and of course there was a lengthy discussion about arrow bars. Now their position in the video was pretty neutral so this isn't necessarily a response to them but it is the spark for a discussion. Are arrow bars cool or not? Let's ignore the fact that as cyclists we wear tight pants for fun so talking about the coolness of anything is probably outside of our wheelhouse. Now before I start you might be thinking Dylan I thought you were all about science and research and other nerdy stuff like that. Isn't whether or not something is cool subjective so therefore this is just going to be your opinion? Yes this video very much will just be my opinions but that doesn't mean I don't have some science to explain why we think some things are cool and some things are uncool so be sure to stick around for that. That being said this channel is all about making you a faster cyclist and arrow bars are undoubtedly faster so it should come as no surprise as to what side of the debate I'm on. Before I go into how cool arrow bars are and whether or not they're making gravel uncool let's first talk about how much faster they are in case you're not aware. A study on the aerodynamics of a cycling position used wind tunnel testing to determine that the TT position can produce a drag reduction on the order of 20 percent. So what does this actually mean in terms of time savings? Since the presenters were talking about dirty Kanza I'm going to use DK as an example of how much time you could save in that event using arrow bars. The disclaimer here is that everyone's different and I'm just using generic numbers from a website called bikecalculator.com to make my calculations. It's also worth noting that arrow bars take getting used to so an arrow bar noob might not be able to produce the same amount of power as they normally do. Now let's say that in 200 miles of racing you can only actually use the arrow bars for a fourth of the time because the rest of the time you'll be climbing or descending or drafting in the pack where you'll need your hands on the hoods or the drops so that's 50 miles where you can use the arrow bars. According to a quick calculation on bikecalculator.com that would save you 22 minutes. As far as I'm concerned that's the end of the discussion right there they're faster what more do you need to know but I'll keep going. This is not an insignificant amount of time at a race like DK 20 minutes could be 20 places or more. Nope, not worth it. I'd rather get last place than butcher my bike like that. You can go take your arrow bars to the nearest triathlon. Now obviously as I said these are rough calculations and there are a lot of factors we aren't considering but the point here is that we're talking about tens of minutes of potential savings. This isn't a marginal gain this is a significant one. Considering that the winner Colin Strickland soloed for 105 miles and won by just nine minutes it's safe to say that had he not had arrow bars on his bike he probably would have gotten caught and lost the race. Now to every single arrow bar hater out there I ask you this question would it have been cooler for Colin to win the race with arrow bars or lose the race without them? The last I checked this isn't a fashion competition it's a bike race and the moment we start caring more about how cool we look than how fast we're going is when I start to shake my head. Cycling is a quirky sport that attracts quirky people and that's part of what I love about it and Dirty Kansa may just be the pinnacle of that. Where else can you find so many people that are stoked about suffering on their bike all day in one place? You've got to be a little insane just to sign up for a race like that let alone win it or even finish it. One of the things that I think is awesome about Dirty Kansa and other unsanctioned races is that you can ride whatever you want. You can ride a mountain bike a road bike a fat bike whatever you have and in the case of the people trying to win or get a faster time you can ride whatever bike setup you think will get you across the 200 miles fastest. The majority of this controversy about arrow bars has been stirred up by pro mountain biker Jeff Kabush who has been very public about his distaste for arrow bars during Dirty Kansa. Yeah man Jeff Kabush said using arrow bars for Kansa is totally lame and he's a badass mountain biker. I mean didn't you see his custom skin suit? Hashtag arrow what am I right? This is of course coming from the guy who won last year's Iceman which is a mountain bike race using a gravel bike with drop bars. When fellow news asked him what the advantages of using a gravel bike were he said just having the drop bars it's almost like being in an arrow tuck on a mountain bike. It's a really high average speed over 30k an hour so it's a bit more like a road race especially near the end. I attacked and got away with Alexi Vermeulen. We were in a little breakaway and it made it easier to roll at speed when we snuck away near the end. Hmm this sounds really familiar I wonder where I've heard this argument before. If using unconventional equipment to gain an arrow advantage in a mountain bike race is cool then why is it uncool when you do it for gravel racing? Let's jump right into the heart of why arrow bars are considered uncool or really why anything in life is considered uncool and that's because it's unconventional or doesn't fit within social norms and conformity may be a lot more powerful than you realize it is. In Solomon Ash's classic psychology experiment on conformity he had subjects perform a simple task where they matched lines of the same length. As we can see from the example the target line obviously matches up with line C. The twist though was that Ash had subjects perform the test in a room full of people who purposefully agreed that the wrong answer was correct. What he found was that on average about one-third of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials about 75 percent of participants conformed at least once and 25 percent of participants never conformed and in the control group with no pressure to conform to Confederates less than one percent of participants gave the wrong answer. This experiment had a huge impact on the study of psychology and conformity and gave us an insight into just how powerful conformity is. Even when an answer is blatantly false 75 percent of us will cave and go with the popular opinion. This explains a lot about society as a whole but let's apply it to this arrow bar situation. When asked the question should you run arrow bars for dirty consa the obvious answer is yes they're clearly faster and making this decision is about as easy as matching those two lines. The reason so many people choose not to regardless of what justification they claim to use is because of conformity. The pro peloton doesn't use them most people don't use them when they go out and ride and there's a pro mountain biker who's telling me not to use them so I'm not going to use them either. Making the decision not to use arrow bars in a race like dirty consa is not unlike matching those lines incorrectly when everyone else did. Conformity and cycling goes beyond arrow bars too. When Team Sky first started wearing skin suits for road races everyone laughed now everyone does it. It used to be uncool to ride a 29 inch wheeled bike for downhill racing and now most of the world cup racers are on 29 inch wheel bikes. Some may argue that arrow bars are less safe but I'd argue that it's a lot safer than the alternative that I see a lot of pros and amateurs alike using which is resting your forearms on your bar tops. I've certainly seen a lot of non-arrow bar users attempting that. People know not to use TT bars when drafting in the pack and wait for when they're either pulling or solo and in a race like dirty consa there are going to be times when you're by yourself battling the wind. The use of arrow bars goes beyond gravel racing as well to marathon mountain bike racing for example. Todd Wells has used arrow bars to win the Leadville 100. Jeremiah Bishop set the course record at the Shenandoah 100 using arrow bars and I myself have used arrow bars to win numerous 100 mile mountain bike races. If there's a significant amount of road or gravel in a mountain bike race then it's advantageous to have arrow bars on your bike. In summary arrow bars are faster so stop worrying about how cool or uncool you look when you're using them in unsanctioned races where they're perfectly legal because you want to know what's cooler than looking cool going faster. What makes gravel racing unique and interesting is its lack of rules. For a lot of people DK is just a personal adventure and an epic day on the bike but just like with everything in life there are people that take it seriously and want to go fast and win and part of the gravel game right now is that you can ride any kind of bike that you think will make you do that. And to Jeff Kabush it's all love man I've looked up to you since I first started mountain biking and you've been a source of inspiration for me. Everything I said in this video is just in the spirit of debate. At DK last year I was just happy to stay with you as long as I could before you dropped to me. Maybe I'll sign up for it again next year and I'll try to hang with you as long as I can but one thing's for sure I'll definitely have arrow bars on my bike because I need all the help I can get. If you guys are interested in trying out arrow bars I left a link in the description for the ones that I use. They're just some cheap ones from China that I intended on upgrading but they work just fine and they're relatively light around 300 grams. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. Be sure to let me know your opinion on using arrow bars for gravel racing in the comments section down below. If you like this video be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend and subscribe for more. If you want to see more training and racing content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And if you want to follow my training check me out on Strava. And if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnson at trainright.com