Power File 4.6.09

Comments

[cliff]

What was your weight on Race day? I outweigh you by a ton and we have surprisingly similar numbers. Your charts are they "smoothed" at all? Does Poweragent calculate a "normalized power" like WKO does?
Thanks,
Cliff

[Mike May]

Hey Cliff-
I was about 172 at Tyson's. Which numbers are similar? The 5-minute power and 10-minute power is calculated wrong (I'm not doing 384 watts for 10 minutes, sadly). But the average power is right, and about the same as it has been for this race for three years running. If your average power is the same, what are you doing better - can't be hiding in the pack. I don't think I stuck my nose in the wind all day at Tyson's.

But no, Poweragent doesn't have normalized power. I wish it did - I'm on a Mac and can't run WKO. But it does smooth the graphs a little bit, often cutting off the top end of jumps if they're not held for very long. "Maximum Power" is usually quite a bit higher than the highest peak on a graph.

[cliff]

time me you
AVG 233 228 very close
5s 940 859
30S 611 544
1m 522 422 Explained by the weight difference uphill
5m 339 384 close
10m 321 384 close
30m 294 245 pretty close
Now that I type it out, it looks different enough. I bet that I pedaled NONE on the down hill but most others kept pedalling. (Gravity works both ways!) I had a fresh bottom bracket, chain and cassette for the race; fresh cleats too. I use a Powertap hub, Garmin Edge, and WKO software.
Keep postin'!

[Mike May]

Ah, I see. Our AVG powers were very close, but it looks like you had much harder efforts throughout (which probably means you also rested better - maybe the fresh drivetrain helped). My 5-minute and 10-minute were actually 276 and 257, over 100 watts lower than they're showing up in this file. PowerAgent recalculates some stuff randomly when you compress a file to just one section (this one is just the race, not the whole ride w/ warmup and cooldown).

But your 30 minute is really high if your AVG is only 233. Did you take the Average for the whole ride (including warmup and cooldown) or just the race? I'd expect your race AVG to be closer to 280.

[cliff]

just the race/no warmup. I agree the numbers seem wacky.

Oh yeah, the clock was runnuing while I was in the ambulance, I think. Let me check... holy crap. you're exactly right. I deleted my time in the ambulance and the avg went right to 280. Normalized power, for the WKO fans (Kyle Jones, Robb), was 368.

[Kyle]

Yeah my NP was 360 for the 30 minutes of racing. Could not really compare numbers for a different race. You guys were chasing and my race decided to do intervals up the hill each time. Similar to Cliff I almost never had to pedal. I weigh 188 right now, still classifies me as one of the big heavy dudes.