Data

Gotta say, I love having the PowerTap. I download every ride and study them briefly before moving on, trying to learn what I can. This week's key bike on the weekend had some power intervals. Warm up, then do a one mile section in the biggest gear trying to accelerate the whole time. Then repeat 3 more times. So I drove down to the hatchery this morning and started from there. I headed over to the canal and did my warmup and then, when I got to 15 minutes, I turned around and started cranking. I was able to accelerate for about 2 minutes or so, but then I petered out a bit. And man did those intervals hurt. They weren't long, but they got my HR up into the 170's on the bike, which is a rarity for me. And pushing along in your biggest gear is no fun. After the prescribed intervals, I headed up to Beals point and finished off the rest of the ride around the lake for a total of 2.5 hours. After that I changed and hit the bike path for a 4 mile run in about 30 mins. I felt pretty good afterwards. Very tired legs, but pretty good.

The coolest thing about the ride was all the data from the PowerTap. I was up over 300 watts for each of the intervals and averaged around 330 or so for each. I'm also experimenting now with intervals on the PowerTap and I have no idea why I didn't try that before! It makes it so easy. And then, on top of that, even though the SW is not chock full of features, you can add intervals afterwards. My overall ride looked like this:



You can see the intervals at the beginning of the plot. Pretty cool. Then, I zeroed in on each separate interval and you can see the stats for each. Way cool. For an engineer, this is pretty cool stuff and even though training with power is by no means cheap, I LOVE the PowerTap and am really looking forward to tracking my progress. After all, the first step to improving a process is to measure it.