Tough race - great numbers - need to retest?



tommyrod74

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Sep 13, 2010
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So, yesterday was the NC State RR Championships. Cat 3 was 67 miles, rolling terrain (a few sharp nasty hills but no sustained climbing), 5 x 13.3 mile laps.

Temperature was 95-100 degrees on the road. Crazy hot.

I was in 2 separate breaks on the first lap, one of which lasted 15+ minutes. Also did a lot of bridging to other breaks later in the race, and also pulling the group back to breaks as well. My goal was to finish with the lead pack while having made it a "difficult race" for everyone else (as opposed to sitting in and waiting for the field sprint and having lots left in the tank afterwards).

I cramped horribly on the first climb of the last lap and limped home with 2 other riders, finishing 20th. Over 20 riders had been dropped and DNF'd by this point.

What was interesting was my power numbers. The first hour I normalized at 281 (my estimated threshold is 285). Through 2 hours it was 262. I ended up with a normalized power of 251 for 2 hours 45 minutes, and that includes the final 10 miles when the lights were totally gone out and I couldn't put out much over 250 even climbing.

Based on this, would you say I need to retest soon, or just bump up my threshold estimate a bit?

As an aside, calculated IF for the entire race was 1.000 per my CycleOps Joule 2.0...
 
Actually given those numbers it looks like your FTP is set about right. What is the maximal 1hr NP from the race file?
 
Dunno. Will check the file when I get home and post again. I can almost guarantee it wasn't much more than 281 though, as the hardest efforts I put out were during the first hour.

I did see a best 5-minute average of 370 watts, which is the best I've seen either in testing or during a race. Much less in a 67 mile road race. That was likely during a bridge effort to a break followed by several hard pull efforts in the break itself.

The 1.000 intensity factor for the entire race raised my eyebrow a bit, though it was calculated directly on the Joule, not via WKO (haven't imported the data yet).
 
I don't use the Joule, but I'm pretty sure it uses its own estimate of FTP and for you it obviously underestimated. I wouldn't pay any attention to it. The WKO IF will be lower.
 
I set my own FTP (and zones) in the Joule setup menus and base these on the WKO zones, so that shouldn't be an issue. Now if the Joule uses the same math as WKO to arrive at NP or IF, I don't know...
 
IF=NP/FTP. So, if IF=1 when NP=251, then FTP was set to somewhere near 251.
 
Unless, as I proposed, it's not calculating IF by that equation. I'm about 99.9% sure that my FTP is set to 285 on the Joule.

Now, I'll have to check, but maybe the bottom end of Zone 4 is ~250 or so? Maybe it's using the bottom end of Zone 4 instead of FTP as the denominator in the equation...
 
Originally Posted by tommyrod74 .

Unless, as I proposed, it's not calculating IF by that equation. I'm about 99.9% sure that my FTP is set to 285 on the Joule.
If it's not calculating IF using that equation then it's not calculating IF. Sounds like a bug of some kind.
 
Originally Posted by lanierb .




If it's not calculating IF using that equation then it's not calculating IF. Sounds like a bug of some kind.
I checked the Joule, and here's the thing: there are 6 zones, but they don't correspond to the zones from WKO. They are:

Zone 1: recovery
2: endurance
3: threshold
4: race pace
5: maximum
6: supra-maximum

I set my zones up like WKO, so that "threshold" zone = tempo zone, and "race pace" zone = threshold zone, so the names don't correspond with WKO, but the numbers do.

This may explain the error, as the upper end of what the Joule calls "threshold" (zone 3) is ~250.
 
Not to distract too much, but I was considering upgrading my wired PT to ANT+ later this summer. From the place that I will use to build the wheel they offer the Joule at a very discounted price and I was considering that since one could look at TSS and some other things during the ride and not have to wait until home to upload and look at it in WKO.

But some of the things you post here now has me concerned if it is worth the slight bit more money.

At the moment since I have the wired version I have my Garmin 705 and the yellow PT cpu. I need the 705 because I often lead routes for my group.
If I went with the Joule I would still have two computers so it seem like overkill just to know TSS on long routes.

Is there anything else about the Joule that you could share as you did with the zones?

Thanks
 

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