To Be Slow, You Must Feel Slow
This week was a recovery week but Saturday was a scheduled TT day to assess my overall fitness. I actually knocked the cobwebs off on a late Friday ride and actually felt really good on the bike. I did several form sprints in preparation for Saturday and recall thinking, "I feel great, so let's see what tomorrow brings."
Saturday began at 530am with getting my son up and ready for a golf match at 7am. Then it was baseball and back to golf for a second match. As the second match was getting underway, I slid off to Columbia, IL and a new TT course for my 30 min effort. I found the roads really quiet, a little wavy, but generally conducive to running an uninterupted effort. Problem for me is that I really didn't feel like riding. I was tired and lethargic and just not in the mood.
After suiting up, I warmed-up for 20 minutes and noticed the entire time the wind seemed to be really gnawing on me from every direction. The course was somewhat of a star-stepped, out and back route. Checking the weather statistics later on, I found the wind speeds were the highest of the day for the hour that I was riding from 2-3pm with sustained speeds of 15mph and gusts of 25mph. My goal was something close to 26mph, but this wasn't going to be the day.
In the end, I ran right at 24mph. My legs felt weak and lifeless the entire time. To add insult to injury, my HR never seemed to hit the right level. Generally for me that's a sign that I'm fatigued. Odd, as I was coming off the recovery week. I'm not overly concerned as I've got nothing competitive for a while. I'm keeping everything in perspective and knowing that more is coming. I'm hoping to knock out a couple of solid Wednesday night TT efforts, so I chalk this one up to not being physically up to par.
Not so fast?
Hey not so fast there bud. By my calculations the difference in air density alone between the Centaur TT and Saturday were worth about 0.2 mph. You say the road was wavy? Meaning rough? Centaur's road surface is about as good as they come. That could easily be another 0.5 mph.
So I'm seeing the potential for nearly 1 mph slower speeds stemming from static conditions alone. Add wind and wind gusts to that... I wonder if you might have had one of those days where you performed well despite feeling not-so-hot.
Either way, it happens.
road surface
Yeah, the road is well worn chip-n-seal and it's just not smooth and flat. Rather it's smooth and wavy. Just the sort of stuff that lifts you off the saddle from time to time. Besides that, there were a 2-3 90 degree turns in each direction. Now considering there was no traffic, you could take the turns at a higher speed. Yeah, overall it may not have been that bad but it just didn't feel that good either.
Overall, I need to find a place where I can run an unabated 30 min TT with a good, flat surface that contains few turns and little traffic. Why oh why can't they pave a 7 mile, 3-lane road just for our use???
Power meter
Not much else to say...though a rough surface causes fatigue that a PM usually will not explain.
The down side to a PM is you will lose a lot of the bliss that comes with not knowing WTF is going on all the time with your performance.
Boz, Unit is right. at the
Boz, Unit is right. at the level you are at a power meter is THE ONLY WAY to measure your t.t. efforts. it is the only tool that doesnt care about wind, road surface, etc...
a 300 watt average (or better yet a watts per kilo figure) is a 300 watt average, is a 300 watt average
Power meters do not care if you are riding on a wood velo or through a foot of mud. they record what YOU are producing regardless of external factors
It is the best way to compare efforts and accurate measure growth. everything else is guesstimating.
love,
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