Some More Signs of Progress

Today I was scheduled for a 2.5 hour endurance pace ride, which I have plenty of route options for. I picked one that gives me a fair bit of climbing and takes me over the biggest hill in the area, well the biggest I've ridden yet anyway, with the idea of maybe setting a new personal best for 5 and 6 minute efforts.

As has been my routine lately, I've tried to do all my climbs in my middle (42t) chainring and for the most part keeping cadence at 80rpm or higher. This gives me about a 10mph speed up most hills, though some of the steeper ones I go slower than that and with pretty high power numbers (400+W) which I can't sustain for very long, yet. I think this has resulted in a lot of the gains I've seen in the past month since I've been doing it, as I'm much more able to keep turning a bit bigger gear for quite awhile before getting too fatigued. This has helped me increase my overall average speed on my rides, even the long (4+ hour) ones. Or maybe especially the long ones.

So with that goal in mind and my route selected, I was very pleased with my results. I set new personal bests for 30 second, 1 minute, 5 minute and 6 minute critical or peak power. Combined with my TT results from Sunday, I've set a number of personal bests this week. Pretty much everything from 30 seconds to 30 minutes has a new high value. The only exception is 2 minute PP, which I missed a new high by 3 watts (2 watts short of tying it).

Duration	Best This Week	Previous Best	Previous Best set on
30 second	627	620	6/20/2006
1 minute	516	510	6/20/2006
2 minute	394	396	6/20/2006
5 minute	357	347	6/1/2006
6 minute	356	344	6/1/2006
10 minute	330	308*	7/10/2006
12 minute	326	308*	7/10/2006
20 minute	310	308*	7/10/2006
30 minute	308	308*	7/10/2006

* Indicates this was estimated power based on average HR, not entirely accurate.

One interesting thing about the value of 308W shown as previous best power for 10, 12, 20 and 30 minutes (set on 7/10). This was arrived at using the formula I came up with for estimating Np based on average HR. So aside from being an estimate, it as an estimate of normalized power where everything in the bests for this week is straight average power. The interesting part, at least for me is this: On 7/10 I did what I considered to be a very strong TT effort on the same course I did on Sunday. Breaking down the workout to separate out the TT effort, I saw that I had an average HR of 157 bpm for the 30 minute effort. As I've mentioned several times in previous entries, I've come up with several formulas for estimating power, and they seem to be pretty accurate, at least for rides less than 3 hours or so. Once you get beyond that cardiac drift really comes into play and power figures should be adjusted downward as much as 10-15% to correct for this. Up to rides of 2-3 hours though, the formulas are remarkably accurate. Of the 4 formulas I look at, one of the best r^2 value (i.e. fits the data best) is:

NPower = (2.4573 * Avg HR) - 76.987

So plugging in the average HR of 157 for my TT effort on 7/10, I get 308.8W, which is what I entered as a manual entry into CyclingPeaks to get my TSS score for the workout. I didn't update my FT with that value though since it was only an estimate and I wasn't sure what the power value would actually have been. So you can imagine my surprise when I did my TT on Sunday and got an average power reading of 308W (310Np). Now my HR average was a couple bpm less on Sunday than on the 10th, but this does seem to reinforce the value of my power estimate formulas for times when I don't have my PT working for whatever reason. Granted, these probably have to be adjusted from time to time as I get stronger as I'll be able to push more wattage for the same HR, but it is good to know I can at least get in the ballpark power wise this way.