Yelsel, that was very cool and very well explained!

My fast/slow twitch stuff was a student research project a quarter century ago, and it was all embryological. (basically: what tells a muscle fiber to develop into either a fast or slow twitch?) Dr. Hauschka called my work "elegant," which ended up having a big impact on me as a college student.

I never did any work directly on adult athletes, which would have been a lot of fun. (that's the kind of cool stuff the kineseology majors got to do)

Self-selection is a big factor, and I know I see a lot of it in my patients. But I think there are a lot of folks (especially women) who are getting into sports later in life and never had a chance to self-select. Lack of opportunity being the stronger factor.

How do you know you are a talented cellist if you never had exposure to music? How do you know you are fabulous at time-trials if you never had a bike until you were in your 30's? And it was a comfort bike?

Anyway, I do think the emphasis in all the biking magazines on "the higher the better" in rpms is over the top. Why should a woman feel bad if she's happy at 85 rpm like Oakleaf? What if a woman is slow-twitch (use it as a shorthand for the myriad of factors that make her more efficient at unfashionable rpms) and she never had any high performance athletic training before and so doesn't know her physiology well enough to be confident in her difference?

How many 20-80 women never had the chance?

Someone earlier mentioned riding a cadence of 140 and being able to maintain it. Cool, that's her ability. Call it "fast twitch" for short. It would be just as much nonsense for me to turn to her and say "that's too fast" as it would be for me to turn to Oakleaf or TCTrek's husband and say "that's too slow."

I'm far too interested in the brainwashing "I'm not good enough" aspect, because I see it so much in my patients and because I see it lurking around discussions of rpms. I'm oversensitive to it. It makes me angry. It makes me very angry that women in particular are steam-rollered by it.

There are no magic numbers. Their are YOUR numbers, and as long as you are happy and your body is happy and your bike is happy, there is no need to feel you don't measure up to some magic number some man in some training facility says is right. (not that I'm dissing Andy Pruitt. He's great. But take everything with a grain of salt. EVERYTHING. Because real life isn't one-rpm-fits-all.)