My powermeter came in the mail at the very end of February, so even though I had been riding in December, January and February, my season officially started March 2nd with the first of many rides with my power meter. Initially I saw myself as someone that had a lot of endurance but not enough high end power. I got this idea from all the distance riding I'd been doing, bike touring and the like, and my lack of 5 second or sprint power. So, my first goal was to gain more anaerobic power.
I did hard workouts, 1' to 5' long intervals, and my power in those zones went up. I even gained a bit of sprint. As a result, my first criteriums went well. The short fast races around a small loop with several corners tend to favor anaerobic power. I stayed with the pack on the first two races, just learning the ropes of riding so fast shoulder to shoulder, and how to attack and move up in the field. I learned about how to recover and smooth out the undulations in speed so I wouldn't have to work as hard. My third race I sat in most of the time, waited for the sprint and took 5th. In my mind I was strong, doing well and a capable racer.
Then last weekend, the Quabbin road race. Sixty three miles around a reservoir filled with short, steep climbs. I considered it a real test of the legs. I knew I wasn't a climber, but hoped to stay with the pack or at least get dropped and finish the race.
Neither of these things happened. The pack went just hard enough on the hills that after an hour and a half, my right calf siezed up like a rusty engine. I couldn't even walk it was so bad. Initially I blamed it on the heat, which had shot up to 85 degrees out of nowhere. Most of my riding had been in the 60's and below, so this made some sense but why didn't it happen to others?
When I got the powerdata home I found out why. My normalized power was 239 watts for an hour and a half. With an FTP of 245, this meant I was at my limit, and there was just no way for me to hold the pace any longer. Instead of just falling off the back and not being able to hang on, my calf seized up and the race was over for me. If I had worked on my FTP in March and April instead of my anaerobic power, it's likely I would have at least stayed with the pack. Really only 15 more watts and I would have been ok.
So, this blog is about my quest for a few more watts.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
A little background
One day, maybe four or five years ago my bike messenger older brother introduced me to cycling; that's right, he was a bike messenger before it was cool.
It was an odd introduction, a dusty basement full of repair stands, creaking workbenches, greasy bike tools and several mostly bearded cycling addicts. It was a bike co-operative, a place to come and get a cheap bike that needs to be fixed up to work again, or to work on your own stuff, or to volunteer.
I started with the former, buying an old steel flatbar hybrid, then moved through the order until I was riding a more respectable 80's road bike and teaching people how to overhaul bottom brackets and adjust their headsets. Getting more interested in riding the bike outside of crowded, smoggy city streets was an inevitability and I can still remember the first glimpse of the countryside. I came down a steep hill on Stenton road, turned a corner and there were fields, horses, trees and only a few scattered houses as far as I could see. All this only a thirty minute ride away from my house. From then on I was hooked.
I dreamed about cycling when I was studying abroad in Turkey, and when I got back from that four month adventure the first thing I did was order a Surly Cross check, build it as a light tourer and start riding more. Pretty soon my first 200 km destroyed me for a week, but I kept riding. Eventually the co-op started organizing sunday rides, always with food at a friends house afterwards. The miles and the bikes continued to pile up, and last summer I took that surly on a 2,000 mile unsupported bike tour with the very same brother that started it all, along with two friends. When it was done, I moved to Western Massachussetts for graduate school, and the scenery never ceases to amaze me. I even dusted off the high school mountain bike, updated a few parts and started mountain biking. A faceplant and more than a dozen stitches didn't stop me, so the next natural step was to start racing.
So, after the normal endless hours of research, planning, comparison charts and graphs, I picked up a Cannondale CAAD9-5 from my friendly local bike shop owner. Of course, a bike nerd as nerdy as me can't just leave a bike stock, and being a numbers crazy engineer could only mean one thing.
I bought a powermeter.
The problem with cycling is you just can't measure anything real without power. It's not like running where a 6 minute mile is always a 6 minute mile. In cycling, you're moving so fast that a slight headwind or tailwind will drastically change your speed for a given effort. Uphill at 15 mph is very different from jogging at 5 mph; the rate you're increasing your elevation is much faster so you have to work much harder. Even heart rate monitors don't tell you much, they're like the tachometer on your car. You know your RPM's, but what's the horsepower?
That's where the powermeter comes in. Now you have a second by second measurement of the amount of power your legs can produce. You can upload an entire ride into your computer and analyze it, compare it with previous rides, see how much work was done in which training zones, or why you got dropped at the race. Instead of guessing that you're faster based on average speeds (which are suseptible to wind, temperature, stop lights etc.), you can actually measure whether your body was able to produce more watts than it used to.
It's amazing, and this blog will deal mostly with my quest for more power.
It was an odd introduction, a dusty basement full of repair stands, creaking workbenches, greasy bike tools and several mostly bearded cycling addicts. It was a bike co-operative, a place to come and get a cheap bike that needs to be fixed up to work again, or to work on your own stuff, or to volunteer.
I started with the former, buying an old steel flatbar hybrid, then moved through the order until I was riding a more respectable 80's road bike and teaching people how to overhaul bottom brackets and adjust their headsets. Getting more interested in riding the bike outside of crowded, smoggy city streets was an inevitability and I can still remember the first glimpse of the countryside. I came down a steep hill on Stenton road, turned a corner and there were fields, horses, trees and only a few scattered houses as far as I could see. All this only a thirty minute ride away from my house. From then on I was hooked.
I dreamed about cycling when I was studying abroad in Turkey, and when I got back from that four month adventure the first thing I did was order a Surly Cross check, build it as a light tourer and start riding more. Pretty soon my first 200 km destroyed me for a week, but I kept riding. Eventually the co-op started organizing sunday rides, always with food at a friends house afterwards. The miles and the bikes continued to pile up, and last summer I took that surly on a 2,000 mile unsupported bike tour with the very same brother that started it all, along with two friends. When it was done, I moved to Western Massachussetts for graduate school, and the scenery never ceases to amaze me. I even dusted off the high school mountain bike, updated a few parts and started mountain biking. A faceplant and more than a dozen stitches didn't stop me, so the next natural step was to start racing.
So, after the normal endless hours of research, planning, comparison charts and graphs, I picked up a Cannondale CAAD9-5 from my friendly local bike shop owner. Of course, a bike nerd as nerdy as me can't just leave a bike stock, and being a numbers crazy engineer could only mean one thing.
I bought a powermeter.
The problem with cycling is you just can't measure anything real without power. It's not like running where a 6 minute mile is always a 6 minute mile. In cycling, you're moving so fast that a slight headwind or tailwind will drastically change your speed for a given effort. Uphill at 15 mph is very different from jogging at 5 mph; the rate you're increasing your elevation is much faster so you have to work much harder. Even heart rate monitors don't tell you much, they're like the tachometer on your car. You know your RPM's, but what's the horsepower?
That's where the powermeter comes in. Now you have a second by second measurement of the amount of power your legs can produce. You can upload an entire ride into your computer and analyze it, compare it with previous rides, see how much work was done in which training zones, or why you got dropped at the race. Instead of guessing that you're faster based on average speeds (which are suseptible to wind, temperature, stop lights etc.), you can actually measure whether your body was able to produce more watts than it used to.
It's amazing, and this blog will deal mostly with my quest for more power.
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