On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

Liar! My riding so far this year has been really crappy. Hardly a bright spot to be seen: never once have I been climbing thinking "I feel really good". However, when I looked at my maximal power curve, there was one shining exception: the Menlo Park Grand Prix. I had been able to sustain higher power for longer there than I have so far on any climb. But did that make any sense? I'd done the same race in 2008, riding in the pack last year as I did this year, and power was lower. I told myself it was the new course, but that didn't add up. The reality is I wanted to believe I was capable of the numbers my computer told me I was generating on that 8th of March. Then this Tuesday, "reconfirmation". Despite feeling especially poor in the extraordinary heat, I was able to put up some confidence-boosting numbers during a 5-minute interval on San Bruno Mountain. Nice. Until I was descending and noticed my power hovering around 100 watts, despite the fa...

I managed to port Ned Harding's Golden Cheetah patch for the new Powertap raw data format over to the command line utilities I prefer using, and finally got the chance to look at the numbers from my recent rides. A comparison: the Menlo Park Grand Prix to the Wednesday Noon Ride.... Powertap data, Menlo GP and OLH. PDF version also available . Interesting results. First of all, I simply didn't think I could produce that sort of power this year. Average power of 271 watts is bigger than what I've managed on any of my climbs of Old La Honda so far. And average power doesn't tell the whole story: normalized power gives higher weight to power above the mean than to power below the mean. It attempts to describe an "effective power": the constant power which could be produced with comparable effort. The number for the criterium was 289 watts for close to 38 minutes. That's almost as good as my best normalized power last year (291 watts) up Old La Honda...