Fat and slow. First race in 8 mths

first race in 8 mths
Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Yes, well... I had gradually become fat and slow in the intervening 8 months. I hadn't been doing many miles, probably only 50-100km per week for the last year, so missing the entire "road season" in Australia was both a good thing - I'd have been left for dead on Blood Hill - and a bad thing - there was another 50kms of conditioning that I had left off my training diary.

So I hit this first criterium with little condition at all, bar some flat road ambling and some intervals on the indoor trainer. Ouch. My heart wasn't into it - or up to it - and I let the bunch go after 3 laps. You can see that I was consistent between numbered power peaks 1 to 5, and then it dropped off before i got going again whenever someone caught me, or I them. Power peak 8 shows me that (a) the ibike is exaggerating again - no way that was over 1600W - and (b) I had plenty in reserve. So I'm confident that by staying 'up front' throughout the race I can stay with them. Mind you, they were averaging over 34kmh, which is a bit of a stretch for me at the moment. I had anticipated averaging 33kmh at worst... or best, if you prefer. So I was hitting and exceeding my maximum by lap 3.

The yellow arrows are pointing out that the power peaks don't always align with maximum speed. Indeed it's on a slower part of the circuit - the uphill from the 90degree left turn that max Watts are generated. Whereas the top speed is downhill to the finish line.

The yellow lines show you where something was going wrong with the barometric readings - as these are laps of a circuit the altitude was fixed and should repeat, over and over. Not jump 10m or more! I'm guessing the battery was dying...

Slope is also a puzzle - 10% is possible but 20% is just not right. Battery? ibike head unit flexing? Me pulling the front wheel off the deck?

These small-medium errors add up to big - and inaccurate - power readings. You could safely halve these outrageous peaks!