BMJ & Christmas III: Bicycle Weight vs Speed

I'm just as guilty as the next cyclist who's willing to spend tens if not hundreds of dollars in order to shave grams off one bicycle component or another.  But my body weight?  It's pretty steady.  The bigger question is whether this expensive mechanical weight reduction really matters, at least to a recreational cyclist, over a relatively short distance.

Thus, in this 3rd of a series of humorous studies published online in the BMJ, the author timed himself on a 27 mile roundtrip from his home to the hospital & back.  So as not to allow a chance spurious ride to throw the results, he averaged his times over 809 miles on his 30 pound steel frame bicycle and another 711 miles on his 21 pound carbon frame bicycle.  From personal experience, I can tell you that the 9 pound difference in weight costs on the magnitude of thousands of dollars.  Yet the average difference in time for his ride was just an 32 seconds (1:47:48 vs 1:48:21 in hours:minutes:seconds) with the confidence interval anywhere from 3 minutes slower to 2 minutes faster on any given day regardless of the bicycle ridden.

So go buy the brand new carbon kevlar titanium bike because you can't stop drooling over it.  Just don't rationalize that it'll make you a faster rider, at least not over 27 miles.  Even the seven time winner of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, said "It's not about the bike".