Monday the 23rd - 70 minutes of PC riding at an easy pace. I was blitzed from the weekend.
Tuesday - off
Wednesday - still tired from the weekend
Thursday - A quick hour of riding through the 'hood on the race bike
Friday - 50 minutes of PC riding at an easy pace.
Saturday - Group ride with the race bike.
Sunday - Relaxing endurance ride enjoying the weather.
PC time this week - 2 hours 0 minutes
PC time to date - 195 hours 0 minutes
Monday the 30th - nada
Tuesday - Some of my "race winning intervals" (similar, but not exactly like those described in "Training and Racing with a Power Meter") on the road bike. Left me dead tired after the workout.
Wednesday - 90 minutes of solid surge tempo work on the regular cranks
Thursday - day off
Friday - 70 minutes of Powercranks
Saturday - group ride where I hit it hard
Sunday - another hard group ride
PC time this week - 1 hour 10 minutes
PC time to date - 196 hours 10 minutes
Only 70 minutes of PCs this week but an interesting conversation with one of my pals. One of the top Texas racers asked him if I was the guy on his team riding PCs. This top racer was stating that he felt PCs helped him and that I was using them too much. Hmm. On the one hand you have a top racer claiming too much use is a bad thing; on the other hand I'm violating the spirit of Frank's Slowtwitch study and also not improving by not using them exclusively. What to think... I do know I've used them for some 60% of my training volume over the last 9 months and it would have been more except for those injury issues over the last 2 months.
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3 comments:
James,
I started out using the cranks daily only to find that they were wearing me out. I could not recover fast enough to do my Threshold work on the regular bike to the best of my ability. I have a Power Tap, but dont utilize it as I should. I switched to using the Cranks only 3 hours per week, 1 hour every other day on endurance rides.after 3 months of using them I went from average Power of 295 for a 25 mile out and back to 350 watss same course. I plan to start using the power tap more and would happy to share my files with you.
Thanks,
Scott Simmons
Scott, I'd be interested in your data, as well as some other key data:
1) how long you've been riding (number of hours under your belt)
2) how long you've been using power
3) your training history
4) your weight
5) data from before PCs
6) data during PCs
7) data after PCs
Whole lot of questions, but I'd be seriously interested from an academic/scientific perspective.
Just drop me a line - tigermilk@sbcglobal.net
I would love to hear why your "top Texas racer" says what he says about training with the product and what he feels is an "appropriate" use for someone like you?
The problem I see here is getting through the transition such that PC's and regular cranks feel exactly the same. While many like Scott Simmons above have reported remarkable improvement with part-time use, we don't know if he could have seen better improvement if he could have gotten through the "wearing me out" stage quicker so that he could use them even more in his training. This transition is a problem for the serious racer and especially the professional cyclist, who is being paid to race well almost every weekend, if they do not transition quickly. As a consequence it seems most of our European pros only using them 3-6 hours a week, especially during the season, as that is all they seem to be able to do while maintaining racing obligations.
The purpose of asking the participants to use them 100% of the time was to see what the potential of the cranks was being used this way in order to allow comparison with those who have used them in other ways. Perhaps part-time use of them is a superior method of training but I cannot for the life of me come up with an explanation as to why that would be the case. If someone can give me a rational reason why that would be the case I am all ears.
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