Raising The Bar

I'm not a very powerful cyclist, I'm more like the little engine that could; I motor along at a reasonable pace for a ridiculously long period of time. The diesel engine that goes and goes, the Energizer bunny though I prefer DuraCell batteries. The...never mind.

After months of training and some concentrated effort,s I've raised my FTP from 210 watts to 220 watts. Oooooh! Well to me it's a big deal. Yesterday I rode to work and was within a few seconds of my absolute best time, which was with a significant tail wind. Yesterday's ride to work had virtually no wind effect so it was me, not Zephyrus pushing me along. And I arrived winded but not ready to fall off the bike like the last time I

Here's screenshot from the iBike software showing the effort. This is smoothed to 5 minutes which does a better job of showing the big picture.

Solid 

Today, Sunday the 14th I did a fairly hard ride with some friends. It was my last big effort before the Cool Breeze Double Metric and "things" have come together nicely. I did a hard ride, but didn't feel like I needed a day off afterwards and my heart rate stayed reasonably low. I'm ready. My best 30 minute effort came fairly late in the ride (see below) and that's a good sign.

A SportTracks screenshot showing my best 30 minute effort.

A recovery ride for the August 15th, some high intensity short intervals on the 17th and a short ride to open up the legs on the 19th.

Then it's showtime! My companions and I are starting out at 6AM and will probably be on the road for 8 hours of riding. After all, it is 130 miles including the ride from the hotel to the ride start and of course the return. Barring a disaster, I'll put up a report next week.

SportTracks and its Almost Unlimited Resources

SportTracks is a pretty amazing program. It allows and encourages people to create plug-ins which expand the usability and versatility of SportTracks.

For example, I import my iBike files directly with a plugin created by http://mechgt.com/st/. This developer has also created plug-ins for training planning, training load analysis and many more. Here's a screenshot within SportTracks that shows the bike speed and relative wind speed. This is from the actual wind speed data as recorded by the iBike, not an approximation from weather stations. Of course, you can zoom in to any one section for more detail.

There is also a very powerful plugin called Training Analysis from Old Man Biking (I love the name) . OMB as he is affectionately known has created numerous plugins for many different purposes. Far too many to mention, be sure to browse his website and give some of them a try.

Here's a chart that shows me getting very close to my maximum heart rate on the last repeat. I hit 178bpm which is just 3 beats shy of my max. At that point I called it a day since one more effort would probably have gotten me half way up the hill and waving a white flag. As you can see I'm not very strong, but my focus isn't as much on strength as it is on health. But that's for another day.

Below is a graph overlaying power on a 16 second delayed heart-rate graph. You can see from about mile 48 to 54 my HR start to gradually climb as my power holds fairly steady or even decreases slightly. Yes, I was slowly tiring and working harder to produce the same power.

I'm a data hound as you can tell. I like looking at big pictures and learning from all the data thrown at me. Today's technology allows us to do things we couldn't have imagined even a few years ago. And through all of that I have to constantly remind myself to "SHUT UP AND PEDAL!"

Sharing Rides Can Be Humbling and Rewarding

Many cyclists talk about this ride or that ride and generally brag about how strong they felt doing some intervals. They, myself included rank a ride and think, "That was so good, I doubt anybody could have beat me up that hill."

And then along came Strava. In a unique mix of cycling analyis and social networking Strava has hit a home run with a fine balance. Not too much info where it gets boring, and not too much socializing lest we forget why we uploaded in the first place.

Here's a ride I did after work a couple of days ago. Overall, the ride was one of my better ones because I kept on pushing myself heading home. It's that horse going back to the barn syndrome. However, my two hard efforts fell short of my best effort and of course I'm dreadfully slow compared to some of the really strong riders in this neck of the woods.



I upload my ibike files to Strava or you can upload Garmin files directly. If you need some help uploading files to Strava, or just have questions just shoot a comment over. For those of you with smartphones Strava has both an Android and iPhone app that uploads automatically to their website. Cool stuff.

Of course with an iDash from Velocomp you can upload your data with power info. It's the best of data analysis and cool factor all in one.