20th
1.21 gigawatts! Great Scott!
I started my power training sessions yesterday night. Power training is a type of training that focused on the development of absolute power output over time by a cyclist. This is measured in watts, and most effectively expressed on an individual comparative basis as watts/kilogram.
Watts/kilogram is simply the number of watts you can put out for any period of time, divided by your body weight. Pro tour riders are capable of producing 6+watts per kilo of body mass for hours on end.
Me, I’m producing a much more reasonable 4 watts/kg for 8-10 minutes at a time and only about 3.5 watts/kg on any sort of a sustained basis. At peak, I’m producing nearly 490 watts, but averaging 353 watts over the interval. Not too shabby.
The chart below shows my power output, heart rate, cadence, etc. over an 8 minute interval from my session last night.
What I find fascinating about this is that I was able to hold on to my watts across a fairly limited band, while riding anaerobically - i.e. above my lactate threshold, for such an extended period. All that running must be really paying off, because as painful as it was to do these intervals (we repeated this test later) I didn’t feel like my lungs or heart were going to burst at any point, in fact, I was still able to dig a little bit deeper in the last 2 minutes, bring up my watts and cadence while keeping my heart rate roughly flat (albeit, close to my heart rate max).
I’ll post a few more of these as I continue with this training program. Please let me know if you have any questions about this dataset. (p.s. clicking through on the image gives you a much better view of the data)
Posted at 20:04 - Comments (View)
