This month’s Smoky Mountain Wheelmen meeting will be:
Monday March 20, 2023 at 6:00 pm at
Outdoor Knoxville 900 Volunteer Landing Lane, Knoxville, TN
We will have a social time starting at 6:00pm and then get the meeting started at around 6:30 pm.
This month we are lucky to have David Bassett who will speak on “Training and Racing Characteristics of USA Cycling Athletes, Both Young and Old”.
David Bassett served on the University of Tennessee faculty from 1988-2022, and served as head of the Department of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sport Studies for the last six years.
The meeting will be in the second floor conference room. Parking is available in the lower front lot and you can enter the building on the ground level next to Ruth‘s Chris Steak House. Beer on tap will be available for purchase, but you will have to bring your own snacks.
Hope to see you Monday night!
Additional background on our speaker David Bassett: David taught courses including Physiology of Exercise, Advanced Exercise Physiology, Fitness Testing and Exercise Prescription, Cardiovascular Physiology, Clinical Exercise Physiology, Laboratory Techniques, Graduate Seminar, and Advanced Topics in Obesity. His primary research area was the measurement of physical activity and energy expenditure in humans, using wearable devices. He and his colleagues studied the validity and reliability of pedometers, activity monitors, and fitness trackers, with a particular focus on standardizing daily step counts.
Bassett and his co-workers conducted research on walking in various populations. They studied groups ranging from school children to inactive adults to Amish farmers. They also explored the relationships of ambulatory physical activity to cardiovascular risk factors. In pedometer intervention studies, they found that increases in daily step counts resulted in improvements in blood pressure, weight control, and increased glucose tolerance. He worked with epidemiologists to show that there is an inverse relation between steps per day and all-cause mortality.
In 1999, Bassett and Chet Kyle published a paper comparing all hour record holders from Eddy Merckx to Chris Boardman. They adjusted for differences in aerodynamic equipment and the altitude, to compute how far each rider would have ridden if those factors were held equal. The following year, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) changed the rules so that the world hour record had to be set on a bike similar to that used for Merckx’s 1972-hour record.
In 2008, Bassett collaborated with researchers in the transportation policy and planning field to study walking, cycling, and obesity rates in fifteen countries on three continents. They found that Europeans walked and cycled more than North Americans and Australians, and that levels of active transportation were inversely related to obesity rates.