Power is an output. Just like speed or pace, it’s a result of the effort, or stress, that you put your body through. And similar to all outputs, it’s absolute. In fact that’s one of the talking points that the uber powermeter crowd touts. A watt is a watt. I would agree. Most outputs are. A pace is a pace, a mph is a mph. BUT, and this is a big but, your body’s ability to produce that watt is variable. And therin lies rub #1.

A lot of the discussion out there is that a power meter is more accurate than a heart rate monitor, so just training via power  alone is a better way to go. I gotta say, that statement doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me. That’s like saying the fuel gage in your car is more accurate than the temperature gage. They measure 2 entirely different things. Powermeters measure the power that your body has generated. Heartrate measures the stress your body is under while you produce that power. So if you leave the heart rate monitor at home for your next ride or race and simply go by the goal wattage that you have calculated for the event, you may be setting yourself up for a tough day. This is because 250 watts in hour 1 in comfortable weather is much different that 250 watts in hour 5 in the heat. It’s these slow changes over time that make it so critical to have an eye on your body while you have the other on the power.

Another problem you run into is the need for constant testing if you want to do it right. Since a watt has no connection with effort of the body, your improvement will be tougher to recognize without constant testing. For instance, lets take our fictional athete Joe. He does a threshold test for power and comes up with a wattage of 100. So he builds a training plan around that wattage and follows it to the T.  After a couple weeks of training though, his body has adapted and improved. So now his effort level has dropped well below what it was intended to maintain the test goal power. Because of lower effort levels his improvement stagnates some. The next test shows that his power has increased to 150.  So somewhere along the way he should have increased the ride wattage to keep up with his improvement. Without testing though, it’d only be a guess. 

Now take Larry who trains wattage and heart rate, but does his threshold tests based on heart rate. So Larry finds that at his threshold heart rate of of 150 he is crankin out 100 watts as well. Larry follows his plan just as religiously, except Larry’s wattage increases througout the training cycle as he maintains the goal heart rates. The next time Larry tests he finds that his his threshold heart rate has increased to 152, but his wattage at that effort level is now 165. Larry’s rate of improvement is faster because he’s monitoring both the stress of the work and the output of that stress.

The other big problem with training exclusively with watts has less to do with the technology and more with the approach. If you look through the training practices, you’ll see that there are goal and average wattages that tested for. So Joe buys a powermeter, tests for his functional threshold power (ftp) and finds an average or goal power for any given distance. So far so good, but the next part is the problem. Once given the average power, Joe tries to stay at that average regardless of terrain. So he ends up riding  easier than normal up the hill and then harder than normal on the descent.  On the surface, not a big deal, but add in aerodynamics and wind resistance and the worm starts to turn. The air resistance on the climb is much different than the descent not to mention the gravitational resistance.  So while power is much more important on the climb, Joe eases up, and when aerodynamics are much more important on the descent, Joe pushes harder. Need an example? Where is the Tour de France won and lost? The mountains. An not just the mountains, but the climbs. If you have 2 riders exactly the same size, and both average 250 watts for a ride, they should have the same time, right? Wrong.

Take rider A, who does just as I mentioned earlier. His goal for average watts is 250, so he keeps that wattage across the entire ride. Up hill, downhill, flats, whatever. His effort is balanced and his ride seems strong. Well done.

Now take rider B, who rides the exact same course and averages the exact same wattage, but takes into account all aspects of the ride. On the climbs when he can get the most power bang for his buck, he pushes 350 watts instead of 250. While this is a bit more tiring, he also makes huge ground on rider A. With little air resistance climbing, all that added power translates directly into speed. Then, rider B only puts up 150 watts on the descent, and at times, even coasts. Why? because the air resistence is exponentially stiffer as speed increases, so with a focus on aerodynamics and rest, rider B only loses a small amount of time to rider A and is able to fully recover.

"The Look"

Now the real world example (although admittedly a bit extreme). Watch a mountain stage of the Tour de France. All the moves are made on the uphill because the power output most directly influences the pace. Once you’re dropped, it’s pretty much over. Sure, riders can make up some time on the downhill, but it’s incredibly small by comparision, even if the wattage is considerably greater than your compeition. You could even call it return on investment.  So while you kill it on the downhill and get a small return, your competition is banking that effort for the uphill, where they will get a huge return by comparison.

So if you get more bang for your buck generating more power on the uphill, how can you tell when more power is too much power for you to handle? That great big red thing between your boobies. Strap on a heart rate monitor my friend, and find out how much stress your putting on yourself.

Power on Wayne. Power on Garth.

In 2009, there were 630 cycling fatalities nationwide. Initially the number seems a bit large, but that breaks down to about 13 fatalities per state. Of course fate doesn’t yeild it’s sword evenly, so I would assume states like Texas and California are going to have a much greater percentage of those deaths than North Dakota or Wyoming. Still, given all the cycling in this country, 630 didn’t seem alarming. But here’s where it got interesting for me.

Bicycle fatality statistics are not reported for just those who ride competitively or as a form of exercise. It records all deaths on a bike. Of that 630 deaths, 28% of those people were drunk. Even more surpising to me was that 91% of fatalities happened when the rider wasn’t wearing a helmet. That means 53 people died last year on a bike while wearing a helmet, or roughly 1 per state per year. There were some other interesting statistics such as percentage that were riding against the flow of traffic and those within 25 feet of an intersection.

I watch enough politics to know that numbers can be resuffled to fit your agenda. (Ever heard the old saying, ” Theres 3 types of lies. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”) Perfect example was an article that I read in looking up this stuff that stated that cycling was one of the most dangerous sports around. Why? The writer took similar statistics that I’ve used and calculated deaths per mile ridden. Since most people (including those who choose to ride drunk at 3 am) ride a very short distance, it skewed the numbers to fit his purpose. Maybe I’m doing the same thing. I don’t know.

Anyway, this is what I learned from my little exercise. If you ride with a helmet, with traffic, sober, during normal people hours (7% were killed between 3am and 6am) and obey the traffic laws (i.e. stopping running red lights). Then you have considerably lowered your chances of getting hit.

Now I’m quite aware that sometimes bad stuff just happens. I’ve seen friends get hit and been hit myself. There will always be jackasses who are allowed to get behind the wheel of a car, not to mention the true accidents that happen. But taking a few precautions will keep your risks quite low.

Oh, and I tried out the route and rode to work the other day. It went much better than expected, and was a great way to add 50 miles to my training.

Keep the rubber side down.

The courses offered are impressive. The Kona bike course is right on the money. The turns and hills are all where they should be and the scenery is accurate as well (you can pan your view and check out the mountains and the ocean on each side of you). I can actually see the hotel I stayed in when was there when I’m riding the course. Same goes for some of the other courses. They have an Alp’d Huez course complete with cheering fans that I’m actually a little scared to ride.

One thing that I have found particulary interesting is that you can connect to the internet and race/train with others. Want to ride the Kona course with your buddy who lives 2000 miles away? Hook up the headset (if you want to talk) and meet him online for a ride up the Queen K. This feature seems to be quite a hit as there are groups online that have regularly scheduled rides in which dozens of people meet up to churn it out. I’ve even seen links to racing leagues.

Having said all that, Netathlon 2.0 is not without it’s flaws. First of all, installing it was more of a challenge than I bargained for. It was a bit buggy, and I needed the folks at NA to reset me and help me a couple of times to get me up and running. It also (initially anyway) was buggy with the upgrades. Running Vista, I downloaded the latest patch and lost the graphics to the courses. After many attempts they got me fixed and it seems they have stablized their product.

The other issue I have with Netathlon 2.0 are the number of courses that are offered. I love the ones that they currently offer, but I haven’t seen a new course in at least 2 years. If the folks at NA were wise, they would create and sell an application that allows us the user to create courses and share them. If they did that you would see virtually every bike event in the world become available overnight. This thing could become a massive hit if they would just let it.

At the end of the day, I would recommend Netathlon 2.0 to anyone who has a trainer and can’t stand riding indoors. I would rather do anything than ride indoors and with NA I’ve had an hour ride just fly by. And who knows, maybe I’ll see you out on a cyber ride one day. I’ll be the guy sitting on your wheel.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, for you loyal Computrainer users, it’s fully compatible.

I see the base phase of training much different. I think base building is the most important phase for endurance athletes. It is a very focused training period in which you train almost 100% of the time in a very narrow window of aerobic effort. This window doesn’t include easy aerobic training nor does it include anything at anaerobic threshold or above. Basically (outside of warm up and warm down) you keep your effort right at or just below your aerobic threshold(AT). For those who use a heart rate monitor this means constantly keeping your heart rate in a range of 10 bpm where your upper ceiling is your aerobic threshold and you never get to your anaerobic (or lactate) threshold . So lets say your AT is 155bpm, then you want to train between 145-155 for your entire workout. Note: this doesn’t mean that this is your average for the workout, this means that if your heart rate hits 156, you slow down. Likewise, if you heart rate drops to 144 you must pick it up. For those who train without a heart rate monitor, this is roughly your Ironman race pace.

Now some (especially those who love interval training) will disagree, as they don’t want to forego the winter track workouts or swallow their pride and get dropped on rides. Science can probably prove either side of the argument as well, so I usually look to who applies any principal and their results.  If you look at the training of endurance athletes, it’s pretty easy to see that the majority of those who are successful implement a targeted base building phase. Take Mark Allen, the winningest triathlete of all time, who began his career running a mile aerobically at over 7min per mile. Toward the peak of his career he could run a mile at 5:25 without ever going anaerobic. Mike Pigg, another one our sports all time greats, once stayed in his base phase of training until September because of the improvements he was making. Legendary running coach Arthur Lydiard preaches the same, stating that one should train between 70% and 100% of your maximum aerobic effort during this time. Even Chris Carmichael, who coaches Lance Armstrong, talks at great length of the benefits of training just below your lactate threshold to build your aerobic foundation.

Here are just some of the benefits you’ll see by training more specifically during the base phase.

Aerobic economy – 99.9% of our racing is done aerobically which is almost 20 times more efficient at producing energy than anaerobic exercise. Chris Carmichael has said, “Endurance cycling” means any event lasting longer than one minute. Even the kilometer time trial on the track is an endurance event because, although much of the early power is produced anaerobically, the event is won or lost in the last eight seconds as competitors with the best aerobic system slow down less.” Just as the best way to be a better sprinter is to sprint, the best way to improve your aerobic economy/ability is to train aerobically. We as endurance athletes need to increase aerobically produced power. This means burning more fat for our calories and not accumulating lactic acid. The more you train aerobically the greater the recruitment of slowtwitch muscles, the better they become at using fat as a fuel source, the faster you get at the same effort level and the more efficient you become at burning fat for your caloric needs.

Stress acclimation – This applies slightly more to the age-grouper and newer athlete than a seasoned vet, but the base phase is the time to slowly increase the volume and therefore stress levels on the body so that it can adapt and later be able to do high intensity with out becoming overstressed (i.e. injury and or overtraining). Bloodflow really determines the rate of how fast different body parts adapt. Your heart and lungs receive a great deal of blood so the adaptation to stress is relatively quick. Muscles adapt a little slower but still adapt in a timely manner. The limiters are the tendons and ligaments. They receive very little blood flow, so when they are stressed, it can take a while for them to adapt. I that they’re also the most important to get built up for the season because when you overdo it and tendons or ligaments get injured, it takes forever for them to heal. So a long and consistent base phase to build up the tendons/ligaments is important in order to have an injury free season.

Muscle memory – This applies to all sports but more specifically to swimming. Repetition helps the nervous system “remember” specific movements so that those movements require little thought to repeat over time. The base phase offers a time to hone in technique and break bad habits. If you are always adding intensity in your workouts then your body will revert back to previous habits ,or “memories” in order to accomplish a performance goal that you have set for the day. If you remove the high intensity you are able to focus exclusively on the desired technique until it becomes the default habit. This is why stroke drills are never done at a high intensity. Once the season kicks in, you should be able to apply the new and better technique to the high intensity workouts without reverting back when you get fatigued.

Not everyone will agree, but like I stated in the beginning, I look at how the best of the best train, and what themes are recurring among that group. The other side to this coin is enjoyment though. The base phase can be very boring, so if some speed work keeps you interested and motivated, then go out and do it. The need to enjoy the journey can far outweigh the need to follow a strict schedule if you end up losing interest in the sport.