As many areas do, we here in Central VA have training tt that we do once a month (big shout out to Eric and Alice Fletcher who make it happen). The challenge in this area is to find a course that has any sustained flats. The best place has a fairly steady false flat on the way out and a correspondingly slight down hill on the way back. Here’s quick Google earth shot of the course.
Time trials are my least favorite of all the disciplines, but the point of this post is not to bitch and moan about tts. Rather, I want to look at one of the new features in wko+ 3.0 by comparing my last three efforts on the course and seeing if there is any useful data that can be gleaned.
This is a screenshot of my last three tts using the MFRA feature of wko+ 3; they’re arranged in descending order of average power — the middle file is actually my best time, but interestingly not the highest power. As you can see all the times are within 12 seconds of each other; power has a six watt spread, probably not significant given the usual +/- 2% error of the power meters. There is a relatively large variation in heart rate — the average for yesterday’s effort is closer to the max of the previous two. At first I thought that might be significant, but then I remembered that I had a bottle of EFS Pre-Race before heading out, so the extra stimulant (even for a coffee addict like me) could explain the difference in heart rate.
So that leaves two bits of data to look at. One would be how aero I can get with clip-on bars on a road frame. Because my power was actually lower for my fastest time, I suspect this explains the time difference. Unfortunately, I don’t have the math to calculate my drag coefficient nor access to a wind tunnel, so I can’t do much with that info beyond getting as low and narrow as I possibly can. Oh, and remembering to take the second bottle off the bike.
That leaves cadence. The two sub 22 efforts were 86, 87 rpm average, yesterday was 93. Significant? Probably not. There are too many other factors at play for one variable to explain the differences, but it is interesting, and I will focus on pushing a slightly bigger gear next time. Because I’m thinking about cadence, it’d also be interesting to play around with the Quadrant Analysis feature, but that’s for another entry.
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