Mid-Sole Cleat Position

Getting the FASTER Experience

“Am I faster like this… Or like this?”  If you’re a serious cyclist or triathlete, you’ve probably looked yourself in the mirror, or in video or pictures and wondered about the same question.

In sport where people spend countless hours training and small fortunes on equipment, being faster matters.  When it comes down to being FASTER on a bike, almost everything gets boiled down into two limiting factors:

1. Sustainable Power – How many watts you can hold
2. Aerodynamics- How much resistance your body and equipment experiences when traveling through the air

You can train your body, push it, strengthen it, and develop a bigger engine, but at the end of the day, you’re not going to realize your full potential until you address the other side of the equation – aerodynamics.  That is why the FASTER performance studio was built in Scottsdale,AZ.  As a fit and aerodynamics mecca, FASTER is the new standard by which all performance centers will be held to.  Started by entrepreneur James Kramer and Paraic McGlynn, the former head of fit instruction for Serotta bicycles, FASTER was a bold vision – a kind of Field of Dreams  vision. “Build it and they will come.”

A little over year ago I visited Paraic McGlynn at the FASTER facility to try and get a sense of the scope of what his vision would be. I am attracted to anything that has the prospect of helping me as an athlete and discovering that the world’s first cycling specific wind-tunnel was going to be built in my back yard was a too big of an attraction to pass up. Paraic sat at a simple desk in an empty warehouse space that was stripped down to brass tacks and cement. Surrounded by engineering drawings, CAD sketches, and artwork of what the facility would eventually look like when it was done, it was obvious that these guys were “swinging for the fences” on this project.  Nothing like this had ever been created in the cycling arena and I could tell this was going to be something special.

A year later, I came back to Scottsdale after having moved to Las Vegas in July of 2011.  The FASTER facility was complete and if your a techno junkie and avid athlete like me, you absolutely have to see this place.  FASTER is like a combination of NASA, Neiman Marcus, and US Olympic Training Center all wrapped up into one package.  You can get fit by one of the world’s best gurus on bicycle position, Paraic McGlynn, then get tested in a state of the art wind tunnel by lab engineers.

“Am I faster like this… Or like this?”  Now I know! Not only that, I know exactly how many grams of drag faster or slower I am in different positions.  Am I faster with the Giro Selector helmet, or the Specialized TT02 helmet/  Now I know (the Giro is faster for me).  The FASTER wind tunnel allows for real world testing by allowing the rider to be turned 360 degrees into any yaw angle imaginable.  This type of testing isn’t available using standard aero-testing in a velodrome, or on the road with a power meter.  You can ONLY do this type of real-world yaw testing in a place like FASTER.