Luckily, Ive been using a Saris PowerTap SL 2.4 and the new mountain-bike-specific SL 2.4 Disc power meters for all of my CrazyBet training. Though I haven’t had a coach for the six weeks or so that I’ve been riding in earnest, I’ve been storing the data from every ride (PowerTaps come with an easy USB cradle and free software for Replica Breitling Chrono-Matic Men's Watch downloading ride data to a Mac or PC). So when I started working this week with coach Neal Henderson, he asked me to upload all of my ride data to an account he created for me on the TrainingPeaks web site. With those numbers, Henderson was able to sit at his desk in Boulder, Colorado, analyze how hard I’ve been working and how my body has adapted to the work, then create a training plan that will make the most of the five weeks I have left until my races in France.
Why train with power? To race faster. That’s really about it. If you’re riding only for fitness, or if you don’t have any cycling goals tougher than simply finishing a century, you dont need a power meter. You don’t even need a heart-rate monitor. There are Replica Breitling Navitimer Men watch countless training plans out there based solely on time or mileage that will give you everything you need.But if you want to race, or if you’re setting more ambitious goals—say, finishing a century in under five hours—using a power meter will get you there faster than any other tool.
What a power meter does and how it does it are too complicated to explain in detail here (a good explanation exists on the Saris website). So, in my extremely glossed-over version:If you were to plot your workouts and results on graph , you would Replica IWC 3725-01 Ingeniuer Automatic watch get a bell curve. As your efforts increase, so do the benefits. But at a certain point, you start overtraining, and your performance drops. The key is to stay in the fat part of the bell curve, so that you’re getting the absolute most out of your training.
