Rouleur, Issue 131

We often hear that cycling, these days, is all about the numbers. We measure our rides and our days in kilometres ridden, vertical metres gained, seconds, minutes and hours passed, watts expended, pulses monitored, grammes of carbohydrate ingested and KoM segments knocked off. The sport has been quantified, in tandem with the quantification and measurement of our lives. How many hours of deep sleep did you get last night? How many steps did you take?

Rouleur 131: the Numbers edition is a celebration of our sport’s relationship with numbers and science. We have counted race wins, looked at the software package adopted by one of the sport’s most forward-thinking teams to organise and co-ordinate their logistics, training, performance… everything, and spoken to some of the riders who are most adept at harnessing the power of numbers to improve their cycling performance.

And what we’ve found, or confirmed, is that numbers, far from being separate from the stories, essence, emotion and passion of cycling, are the very building blocks of these things. Our training diaries, the races we watch, the rides we do, can be measured and documented, but they are far more than that – they are repositories of meaning, and they are the stories of our cycling lives.