She cannae take it captain!

I'll start with a Happy Easter to all of you! This week I'm going to talk to you about the progress I've made since receiving my beautiful new wheels and power tap from Mosquito Bikes. I've got three races (criteriums) out of the way to date, and have had some interesting results in statistics thus far.

Now I wont lie, I went for the powertap because my coach swears by it's advantages as a training method. This was my main influence for the purchase, amongst several hours of research and asking my fellow experienced cyclist friends their opinions. The decision to go for a hub rather than cranks stemmed mainly from at the same time requiring new race wheels and not having a bottomless pit for a purse. So, two birds with one stone, I got the powertap built into new wheels. 

There are many different kinds of power-meter and
can vary greatly in price. Research before investment!

So how has this new fangled device (the CycleOps PowerTap Pro) of mine helped? Has it been worth the money? Oh hell yes. I've mainly been training on the turbo, indoors, constant efforts - this makes for much nicer results on the figures I've been getting back from the powertap. It's allowed me to have a much more controlled training environment and see where I need to work harder. Viewing the figures after races has also been fascinating as you can probably imagine. I'm not going to get all geeky over the statistics, but I am going to explain the advantages I've found by owning one of these.

Beforehand, I was training from heart rate. This is all well and good as a beginner, most people fit into a guideline set of training zones (different heart rate "zones" based on your maximum and minimum heart rate) and can assess efforts based on these. Unfortunately, typically, I'm not one of those lucky people that has an "average" heart rate and much to the dismay of my coach we had a lot of work to do in the beginning to try and determine some sort of reasonably reliable plan. My maximum heart rate is very high, it's always been high but thanks to my former lifestyle of indulgence it's even more erratic. Now I'm beginning to see the real damage caused by habits such as smoking and drinking. I can quite happily sit at 187-191bpm for hours on end but now with the assessment of the powertap it would appear that sitting on these very high rates could mean I'm still doing absolutely no work whatsoever. Oh dear. 

Nothing to do with my post but here's a pic of my hero
Marianne Vos winning the Women's RVV (Flanders)

So now we can finally almost ignore my heart rate. Jamie (my coach) can see if I'm perhaps under the weather, if my weirdo heart rate looks unusually low or high depending on what power output I'm giving. My training has ultimately been revolutionised.  While last year training to heart rate was working well because of my initial lack of fitness (anything was a benefit), now we can see it has perhaps resulted in me not training hard enough in some instances - because the figures my HR gave made it look like I was working much, much harder than I actually was. This is perhaps a frightening prospect, as it means while I thought I was working very hard, I'm going to have to work even harder. However, while frightening it is also exciting. I now have a fantastically detailed platform on which to realise my potential... there's that born again athlete speak again! Now I have real goals, comparable to professionally published figures, and I can start looking at the bigger picture in terms of my racing 'career'. While I originally thought I was built for sprinting, my power outputs are starting to make us think I might even be an all rounder, a domestique perhaps? It's also exciting to see that while I thought my climbing skills were dire, they're actually not that bad at all! 

I now know that, when I'm at my best, I can produce good power.. but even better I can also train harder and harder and push those numbers up as I go on, rather than sitting at a benchmark and never progressing. This is noticeable in my average speeds on the road and on the crit tracks. In my first race I was unable to push hard enough to hang on to the peloton from the get go. Now just four weeks later, while I'm still making newbie mistakes, my power and speed has increased to the point that I'm doing solo laps at speeds I couldn't even sprint at a few months ago, comparing myself to women of a much higher category than myself on the likes of Strava. I have my coach, and my new powertap to thank for this. It speaks volumes that training scientifically is as beneficial as just getting on the bike and going quick. 

For some interesting info on the subject, check out Joe Friels articles on training with power and specifically this one on "Why you need a power meter" - http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2012/01/why-you-need-a-power-meter.html