Consistent power in outdoor conditions

gonnzo

I posted the following on the dashboard and was encouraged to post it here after a discussion began.  If you've found your way through this learning curve, please help the rest of us.

"First outdoor ride with power, gusty winds, and hills. Holy crap!! I have no power control at all!! Target watts: 225. Look down at the meter about every two seconds: "233", OK good..., "89" damn, push it, "339" shit, too hard, "144", "129", 341", "220", "189"... and so on. I was all over the place. I'm assuming the control will come over time, but wow! I can imagine how you blow up on race day in conditions like these without live power feedback and some practice at maintaining target watts. A whole new respect..."

Norton

Practice makes perfect. We all went through this stochastic phase and learned how to apply steady power, no matter the external circumstances. Uphill, downhill; rock it steady!

GSmith821

It takes some time and like Bill said, lots of practice.  You will start to get a feel for it.  Wind makes it a little difficult for the first time, but be patient and focus on steady uphil and not coasting downhills.  As my cycling technique improved, not mashing down, my output got more steady.

Tom Glynn

Power is inherently choppy anyway. Much more power at the "10-20" clock position than at "12-6" for each leg as you go round and round. You can set the power to average over difference ranges. Pick 5 seconds or higher and a lot of the erratic numbers go away.

Practice pedaling smoothly but don't drive yourself crazy!

Coach Rich

1. Do the average thing that the others have discussed.
2. Over time you'll get better at applying power more smoothly. More importantly, you'll no longer spike the watts at any increase in grade, wind, etc
3. Over time you'll develop of skill of never putting watts to the pedals that you don't mean to. By this I mean I never look down at the dial and see 400w and say "whoa...where did that come from!" I only see high watts when I want to produce high watts. No mistakes and certainly no mistakes in a race.
4. Over time you'll get used to the numbers bouncing around. Watts isn't like speed, hr or cadence -- numbers that are very, very steady. Watts move around and you get used to it. So when you want to hold 250w, what this really means is that when you look at the dial you expect to see 245, 250, 248, 253, 249, 255...etc. That's about as good as it gets, in terms of steady, but it's good enough.

I ride with a Joule and I display current watts in the top left corner and normalized watts in the top right corner. When training I generally try to keep the left number above the right number at all times. The normalized power number, I believe, gives me a more accurate, cummulative picture of the training I'm doing across the entire ride. Also on the right side of the display I have IF and TSS. I'm always trying to drive the IF up and am aware when it drops.

gonnzo

Thanks all. We'll keep at it and I'm sure will improve, hopefully in time for race day

carls10

@ Brian- no suggestions but some sympathy. I also did my first ride outdoors with power this past weekend. First hill immediately out of the driveway was 412W. My FTP is 140... It was really eye opening! Good luck my friend, keep it steady!

gonnzo

@Carly - thanks It's good to have company. The other situation that caught my attention was accelerating away from a stop sign (we all stop at those, right?) and even when not feeling like I was pushing real hard looked down to see over 500w. Another match gone (poof). We can ignore stop signs during the race, but that might be a good reminder for a special needs or porta potty stop: don't burn out on the acceleration.

gschlossnagle

The match is only really burned if you're spiking like that for a 20-40 seconds I think (I think that's consistent with the data from the Coggan book and elsewhere). That's why you can't replace your 30/30s with 'pulling away from a stop sign' repeats. :-)

Gordon Cherwoniak

Brian,

I also had this same problem last year my first season with power.  I actually haven't got out this year other than the mountain bike and we are expecting snow again tonight.  In any event I don't have much to add but the trainer is much easier to keep the watts consistent.  Also I found that as my FTP increased, started at 180 last year and moved up to 241, and my weight came down this helped the power spikes from being outrageously out of the ballpark.

Then I went to IMC and rode in the mountains, discovered I was still too fat for a 240 FTP and a 12-27 and suffered on the bike ride.  It was a good learning experience and a real gut check.

Gordon

chris malone

Maybe concentrate less on the pm and the watts flashing at you and more about how the riding feels. Stay consistent with your cadence, keep up with your gears, no mashing. The watts will work themselves out. Soon you'll know without looking where you are, watt wise and effort wise. Steady riding with good cadence gets you where you need to be. Good luck.

Jeff Unruh

Brian,

Same boat here - new to power and just starting to head outside - actually saw 600 watts on a hill. On the trainer it took a huge effort to see anything above 450 W. Spiking 600 was "easy".

I started to focus much more on pressure on the bottom of my feet (as I heard on many a podcast) with respect to hills. Seemed to help out and no doubt more outdoor riding will as well...

Coach Rich

BTW, there's nothing wrong with drilling the watts up a hill on a training ride. The ability to ride steady (not spike watts, only doing the watts you want to do) is a skill that, once you have it, you can turn it off and on as you want. But more work = more fitness so...do more work. Ride hard, don't over think it, but learn the skill of how to shut that off and ride steady when you need to.

gonnzo

@George - good clarification on the "burning matches" bit. I was still feeling that stop sign restart a minute or two later and thought it fit the definition. I'll keep your comments in mind for future rides and see how well it matches my body's capabilities.

@Gordon - thanks for the story of another bigger guy like me (5'10", 210#) working to improve, and the warnings about race day on a hilly course. I live 5 miles from the course I'll be racing this year but I'm not sure how much I can learn in training rides or RR to prepare me for the big day. Still getting snow?! I thought we had it bad here in Wisconsin (<40deg tonight and a hailstorm a week ago) but I now know how much worse it could be <img src='http://members.endurancenation.us/DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default//emoticons/smile.gif' align="absmiddle" border="0" />

@Jeff - no doubt! SO much easier to spike outside without even feeling it. I could never create that in my basement (a comment both good and bad).

@Rich - Thank you for the added comments that it's OK to do more work on these rides. We get hit with so many messages that tell us to stay within prescribed effort levels and it's nice to hear that we can hammer sometimes and not do harm. Like many here, my love of biking comes from from the joy of attacking hills. It's so hard to turn that off. I'm trying to learn the skill first so that I have it for race day, but once I do it will be fun to pound the hills again and call it training

@everyone - thanks for your comments and encouragement! I'll keep at it and hopefully someday become the veteran sharing the same wisdom with the next generation of EN'ers in years to come. Until then I can only appreciate what a great group of folks we have here and how much I"m learning.

Thanks all

jmoss70

Brian - Everyone else has covered this quite well but I will add to the suggestion that you change the settings on your power meter to average every 3-5 seconds.  I think by default it is set at 2 seconds.  That's why you get some real crazy numbers.  Also, practicing smooth and even turnover, even in the wind or on hills, is hard but if you concentrate it will smooth out the power numbers.  At the end of the day this is excellent skill training to have for any race situation.

Coach Rich

When I downloaded my Joule today I noticed that I have my power averaging set to 10secs, FYI.

Hammering hills: today I did 30" on, 45" after my 2 x climbing intervals today. I was riding with a guy who won a big stage race here last month, riding Cat4, should probably be Cat3. I was doing 400-425w on these 30" intervals so that's my number when I really drill very short hills. When I do that stuff now, I take a quick glance down at the meter to make sure I get in at least 30" of this effort and I call it an on-call Vo2 interval.