Two Wheel Blogs

I guess we got lucky today. The forecast I had last heard said it would be cooler this weekend, but wet. Yesterday certainly was. Today started out looking every bit the rainy day we all expected. Even thought the clouds threatened, they couldn't hold back the sun for long. Put it all together and it added up to dry, mostly sunny and a high in the mid 80's.

With weather like this, how could I not get out and do something serious? I saddled up for a match burning ride.

You know about burning matches, right? You call it burning a match when you spend significant time above your functional threshold power. You only have so many matches you can burn. When the last one flames out you're toast, popped, off the back. If you race and the other guy has one more match left and you don't, you lose.

I just like match burning workouts because they set the standard for pain. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get complacent. I'll be riding along, thinking I'm hurting, and it dawns on me that I might not be in as much pain as I think I am.

A power meter helps a lot here. Watts don't lie. When I feel like I'm hurting but the watts disagree, it's one of two things: I'm either really tired and probably should not be pushing myself so hard, or I haven't dug deeply lately and my internal pain-o-meter needs recalibrating.

Today was all about recalibration.

I warmed up and then started hammering. Wattage wise, I was looking for anything 10% or higher than FTP and a duration of 30 seconds or longer. When it was all said and done I'd burned 17 matches. I might have been able to manage one or two more but I wanted to keep the workout reasonably short.

The chart shows how well it worked. See the segment in the middle where the yellow line crosses above the red dotted line? Some of the matches I burned lasted 2-4 minutes. Just about perfect for calibrating the pain-o-meter.