Then I really hated it when I noticed that according to the powertap, I had the power of an untrained cyclist.
The thing with the powertap is that it is absolutely relentless with it's honesty. It is the Simon Cowell of bike computers. The speedometer says "wow, you went fast, 38 miles in 2 hours, that's an average of 19 miles per hour, with traffic that's pretty good." The heart rate monitor says "wow, you kept your average heart rate above 140, with all of the stopping at intersections that's a good aerobic workout".
On the other hand the powertap says "You averaged 175 watts. You are a fucking pussy. Small undernourished children in 3rd world countries put out that kind of wattage when they haven't ate anything but a package of peanut butter crackers in the past 3 weeks. Fabian Cancellera puts power out like that while pissing off the bike. Steevo puts out that kind of power while making videos about bike racing at home."
Then you start to figure the thing out. You figure out that the hill that you thought was a good workout, really isn't a good workout unless you attack the shit out of that mother. That Dirty Dozen hills might be hard, but you actually can go easy up them, and if your eyeballs aren't ready to pop out of your skull, you are going easy, no matter how many fat men you beat up the hills.
You find out that going for an easy "endurance" ride, isn't really supposed to be that easy. That you are probably spending more time in the fabled no-mans land of so-called junk miles.
Then there is the strange ritual that powertap/srm/whatever-overpriced-gadget users go through about once a month. Instead of just going out for a ride, or doing a "workout" with intervals and such, they perform "testing". As if racing isn't enough of a test.
Supposedly, Testing is where you truly find out what you are made of. Or, if you are in my boat, you find out that you apparently have no idea how to sprint, nor how to really race a bike because your numbers say you are ridiculously strong even after putting in countless hours of junk miles.
So what do my numbers say...after testing, and comparison to some silly charts found in books, I have the 5 second sprint of a cat-5, a 1 minute sprint of a fast cat-4 (which is code for a cat-5 who has done enough races to break the expensive carbon fiber wunderbike they used to have), but the 5 minute power of a cat-1 and the threshold power of a fast cat-2/slow cat-1. Then you go ride a century, put a half hearted sprint in for a town sign, and turn in a new 5-second record that puts you up in the cat-3 range.
Put simply the numbers still say "you suck", just in a different, more intimate way. They really say I don't know how to turn myself inside out, dig deep, enter the "pain cave", to go beyond the rivet. Put simply, to compete. Last weekend at the cross race Steevo yelled out "pain cave" as Jake and I passed by him on the sidelines, and I was thinking "I'm just sitting in man, then I'm gonna outsprint him", then I crashed. Maybe this weekend will be different.











