I finally took a few minutes to check out Craig's 2Peak data, and saw these guys cranking out over 300 watts for the entire bike of the Ironman, which is over 4 hours long. I wanted to see what that felt like. I forgot to add that the guy Craig references did this while maintaining a steady HR of around 140, right where I want to be for my race pace eventually. Well, suffice it to say that I am not going to be setting the bike course record at the Ironman. I put the exercise bike at the Y on Watts and tried a number of different combinations of cadence and resistance to see what kind of wattage I could generate. I was able to get up to nearly 400 by pushing hard with pretty high resistance, but that was not something I could do for long. That's essentially sprinting on the bike, though I was still seated. What I ended up doing was averaging around 210 watts for the 36-minute bike ride, maintaining an average cadence of about 100. I did a section later in the ride where I held an 85 cadence with higher resistance, which output about 240 watts continuously. I'm not sure if I could've kept that up, but it felt okay. This would be fun to do day after day, trying to find the perfect combination, as this would answer the cadence + gearing question, assuming, of course, that we all have the same crank length, which Craig and I shouldn't by race time (although we probably still will). I suppose there is a kinesiology study to be done here (hint Jim?), if no one has actually answered the crank length + cadence + resistance question yet. Since different crank sizes are hard to come by, it may be kinda moot for real world application, but maybe we could change that by showing that there is an advantage to longer cranks for people with longer legs. Makes a lot of sense to me. This would change bike geometry and soon the world!
Anyway, I would like to up my average output on the bike, but we all know that running is where the action is, so I have to keep plugging away at that. Losing weight will not aid in increasing power output on the bike, but it will reduce the required watts needed to move my wide load up the hills. 240 watts isn't gonna be close to the good guys, no matter what I weigh, so I guess I need to improve that too.
The good news in all this is: I am feeling confident I can finish the race. And that is a victory in itself.
3 comments:
What are you talking about? We all have different size cranks! Mine's about 10 inches! ;)
POWER!
But, seriously... I am amazed what the Tour De France guys can do as far as wattage is concerned. They crank out high wattage for extended periods of time. Also, Miguel Indurain (sp?) used a very long crank arm in the tour. I suspect that Lance did too (based on his cadence, he always seemed to be pedaling at half the speed of the other guys and would just own them)
Yes, I think Craig mentioned Miguel's long cranks during his investigation into this subject, but when you look for them to put on your bike, you can add about 10 mm and that's it, unless you get some kind of special spindle and rings. BMX has already figured this out and they have really long cranks available, but the choices for road racing seem limited, or at least hard to find.
None the less, if any of us should find the answer to this problem, please put the word out. I will buy longer cranks in a minute if I can find some that fit my bike.
As for the cadence speed + gearing question, it seems to be a matter of quad strength vs. aerobic capacity. If you have both, you can really move. I have quad strength. Maybe next time I go to the gym at off-peak hours, I will see if I can get up to 500 watts. I'll have to put the resistance up to 20 and spin a cadence of 120 or something, so I'd rather not do that with the whole gym watching, but I do want to see what kind of max output I can generate without regard for sustaining it or looking sane.
Post a Comment