I agree. Many-many (maybe too many) words follow. The purpose of an airplane wing is to produce enough lift to hold the airplane up in the air with minimal resistance to going forward. Going forward efficiently in an airplane is all about the lift-to-drag ratio. The main objective of the kayak paddle is ONLY producing lift (force perpendicular to the paddle face). This is all about maintaining high lift at high angles of attack. Analogous to an airplane wing used only for climbing without forward motion as an objective. The euro is obviously better for that. The "forward" motion of the paddle - the motion parallel to the blade surface - does not contribute to forward motion of the kayak. It only contributes to drag. This is working against the GL paddle. On the other hand, as you point out about your joints, the human body is not an indestructible machine. All the anecdotal accounts on this list have substantiated the lower stress of the Greenland paddle and a few (myself included) have experienced slightly higher SUSTAINED cruising speeds. Similarly, cyclists have minimum oxygen uptake at 40-to-60 RPM pedal cadences. Any serious cyclist knows that peddling high outputs at those low RPMs will destroy the knees in the long term and result in poor performance in the short term. 90-to-110 RPM is the norm. I first read about this in the 80s, but in the meantime other tests of body stress have been put to use: http://www.uth.tmc.edu/apstracts/2000/regulatory/October/355r.html That abstract and some other articles I looked at indicate that the extra stress on the body at lower RPMs is measurable, even if the oxygen uptake is lower for a given load. I'm guessing the same is true of paddling as with cycling. It's not just all about efficiently converting oxygen and fuel into forward motion. I didn't read any of the cycling articles all that carefully, but what I gleaned was that for long high intensity rides, oxygen uptake was not the limiting factor. Therefore, minimizing oxygen uptake was not necessarily the way to maximize performance. I never seem to paddle anywhere near my maximum aerobic output. The limitation seems to always be in my muscles and joints, not my heart and lungs. Somehow, over distance, the Greenland paddle may be more efficient for the whole body system. I wonder if any careful studies have been done on this as they have for cycling? This is not about winning races. Lets assume that gear has evolved recently to give the fastest speeds over race distances. This is about efficient pain free paddling over a lifetime. Did Inuits stumble on the narrow blade because they didn't have many big pieces of wood, or did they find by experience that they couldn't afford to have their bodies break down at the expense of being marginally faster for a few years? Steve Brown -----Original Message----- .......... Test evidence includes tank tests that show efficiency increases as aspect ratio decreases. The theoretical is limited to the observation that moving large amounts of water at low velocity is more efficient than small amounts moved fast. It would appear that the GP does more of the latter. ........ Mike *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Sep 08 2004 - 19:01:15 PDT
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