…but 350 watts would be nice.

By Aaron Wolfe

“What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

@##=#<1,L>@##=#As the lead group started tilting upward at the bottom of the final climb of last year’s Green Mountain Road Race, someone yelled out, “Go now if you’ve got big balls!” The guys who weren’t wasting breath laughing accelerated up the hill, shattering the group. Big brass ones are an important fraction of what it takes to get to the top in respectable position, but they can’t, um, or shouldn’t, be measured or trained. What can be measured and trained is fitness, and more and more people are making the argument that power meters are the best tools for doing that.

Leading the way are Hunter Allen, an elite level coach and former pro, and Andrew Coggan, exercise physiologist and author of most of the important information about training by power. They’re also two-thirds of the team behind the popular power data analysis program, CyclingPeaks.

Velopress just released Coggan’s and Allen’s book, Training and Racing with a Power Meter, which is the first attempt at a mass market guide for cyclists with power meters. As such, it’s a good first step, but far from the only training advice you’ll need. If you’re already in the power choir it may, at times, seem like the authors are needlessly preaching to you, and maybe trying to sell some software. If you’re not, they can come across like a couple of earnest Mormons on their two-year service knocking on the door you hide behind to do your trainer rides with a heart rate monitor.

The book will not tell you how to design a training plan or how many hours to ride, although it presents a sample plan. Nor will it teach you how to win races, although it takes you through power data from a couple of winners. For all that you need a lot of experience, and/or a coach, and/or a book like Joe Friel’s The Cyclist’s Training Bible. In fact, much of what Allen and Coggan have developed is based on Friel’s work. The rest, they say, is based on poring over thousands of power meter files from their clients and others, which seem to include some top road racers and triathletes.

As an A to Z book on power, many pages are wasted on any cyclist who even occasionally reads the magazines and websites. You won’t buy this book to convince you to buy a power meter. You don’t need the glossary for the definition of prime or big-ring sprint.

But you should read why power should supercede heart rate in training.

And you’ll definitely want to read how your power data can help you track your accumulated training stress so that you train hard enough but not too hard. Hint: You can’t judge it by miles, hours or the change in skin contrast at your tan line.

It makes sense that the best sections of the book cover what power meters do best. Testing, testing and testing. With a power meter, testing is training, and training is testing. The book explains how to use your accumulated training data to come up with a lactate threshold number, even if you’ve never suffered through a lonely Friday night fake-TT-effort interval on your trainer while your friends are out getting drunk, or struggled to keep pedaling at your VO2 max while your coach draws blood from an earlobe at $50 a drop. Note that the authors prefer Functional Threshold, which they define as the average or normalized power that can (or could) be maintained for one hour, about the time it takes to complete a 40k TT. (Don’t panic! You don’t have to complete a one hour TT to get an FT number.) Normalized Power is the authors’ magic number (and trademarked formula) that makes you feel better about a low average—it’s a calculation of how hard you could have gone if you’d pedaled consistently without changes in grade, wind, traffic and so on.

Quadrant analysis of a 30 minute TT effort on the rollers.

Additionally, you can combine your best moments or minutes on the bike, no matter where or when then happened, to build an accurate profile of your strengths as a rider and to show you where you might need some work. Cue the fun chart where you compare your relative power (Watts/kg) to all the riders, including pros and recreational, from whom the authors have collected data. Keep in mind though that your Cat 3 sprint on paper may not get you anywhere in the C field if you don’t have the knockers or the know how to use it. That 5 or 4 on your license only changes with results.

Conversely, testing, as the authors suggest it be done, is no more complicated than a few hard intervals performed consistently every four weeks.

So what about racing? We don’t train just to raise our Watts per kilogram. The lessons go beyond simple explanations like “I blew up on the hill” or “I worked too hard in the break.” Now you’ll really know why you go out the back at the critical moment, and how to train that weakness. Using a power data file from a race you can see why you blew up or how much too hard you were working. Want to know what a wasted match looks like? Or better, what a successful attack looks like? However, don’t expect guys who come up with such an inspirational title for a book as Training and Racing with a Power Meter to make you go faster by questioning the size of your cojones. You’ll have to dig deep on your own.

Then there’s the intimidating sounding Quadrant Analysis (another trademark). QA is not some study of four-corner crits, but a graph of every moment of data in a race or training ride, plotting force on the pedals against the speed of the pedals (not cadence, but literally how fast the pedals are moving). Verging on too much information, QA can explain how a ride went down from a neuromuscular perspective. Sure, you averaged 240 watts, but was it steady, or were you alternately coasting and sprinting, and is that what you should have been doing? Neuromuscular, you ask? That’s when your brain says “jump” and your legs say “I can’t hear you.” It takes more than leg strength and/or speed—your legs have to be good listeners and your brain the great communicator.

Quadrant analysis of last year’s final 3/4 race at Floyd.

Well and good, you say, but climbing teaches how to climb, and racing crits trains endless short, hard efforts. True, the power masters will answer, yet to learn faster how to race or train better or understand the required efforts more thoroughly, you need to get the most out of your power meter.

Now for the big question, do you need this book to get the most out of your power meter? Not really. Most of the information and tips can be found online in articles by Coggan or in discussions on the Topica.com Wattage email list. So in a way the book is merely an anthology of Coggan’s and Allen’s articles and emails—word for word in some places. But the book will help. Everything is in a logical order here and stitched together in a way that makes sense.

Pros: Authors’ expert knowledge compiled in one place. Pretty easy to understand. Helpful advice for designing individual workouts. Tickles your interest in sports science and physics. Fun with graphs and charts. Velopress’s low production values keep it cheap, but we all know how much your power meter costs, so who cares?

Cons: Won’t help you write your season-long training plan. Too much beginner info. May be out of date before your batteries die.