Crissy Ave climb: power data

Training for my upcoming 50 km race was going so very well. And then my tooth broke.

The result: I had to get a tooth extracted by an oral surgeon. No big deal, right? An hour of unpleasantness, and it's done. Business as usual.

But no such luck. I ended up exhausted. I did a few runs on the days following the procedure, very short runs of a few km each, but then something just dragged me down. Maybe it was allergies. But I think it was a cumulative thing, and the oral surgery was the straw that broke the adrenal's back.

So for the first four days last week I was work from home, with essentially no exercise. Then I commuted, by foot and train, to work on Friday. Saturday I rested again, then today (Sunday) I got in a nice little ride with Cara. Another chance to get on the Winter Allaban. It was fun, although I couldn't resist a little test riding over some scarified pavement on the shoulder of Great Highway. Obviously, the bike was a lot more confortable there with 32 mm tires than it would have been with 26 mm tires. But my rear fender came loose. Examining the bolts, I realized they didn't have washers, so after the ride I put in a washer on one (couldn't get the bolt to grab on the other one) and Loc-Tite on both. Hopefully that holds better.

On the ride I made just two little efforts. One was on a little climb of Crissy Field Ave, from Crissy Field up to Lincoln Ave. It's a nice short little power climb. It's funny how certain climbs just call out to be ridden hard.

Recently I looked at data from climbing the Cortland Hurl. Here's a similar plot for the Crissy Field climb:

plot

Note the dependence is a bit steeper than speed proportional to power. That's curious from the standpoint of steady-state power equations, but if you throw in acceleration power (proportional to speed-cubed if I'd done a standing start) maybe it makes sense.

Despite my new torque wrench, the Vector still appears to be reading below the trend line set by Powertap, although some of the Powertap data also fall similarly below that trend line. I know -- it's terrible I've not done a direct comparison yet, and I'm long overdue for that.

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