The beauty of training with a power meter is that it forces you to keep a detailed training diary. The more data you have, the better. So at the end of season it is good to look back into the mountain of numbers and see what worked and what didn’t.

Below is the Golden Cheetah Performance Manager Chart following my 2012 cycling season. More detailed information on the terms can be found here. In general the chart describes the following: fatigue (pink), freshness (yellow), and overall fitness (blue), in addition the light pink bars represent how hard I worked each day.

The second image is a grayscale version of the first showing the periodization. The bulk of the training was Base training (green), followed by a Build phase (Yellow), finished off with a final Maintenance and Taper (red) for peak condition around the Bulgarian National Time Trial Championships. The last part represents rebuilding my base fitness (green) and taper again (red). For more information on training periodization click here:

If you just consider the Performance Manager it looks like the perfectly scheduled season. Fitness went high while at the end I traded some fitness in order to get high freshness. However, there is more than meets the eye. Below you can see the relationship between my season fitness (blue) together with what Golden Cheetah calls Aerobic Power (5,10,20,30,60min peak power).  Addtionally you can see that my Functional Threshold Power changed from 325W to 350W mid season and all the training zones shifted accordingly. You can see that the overall trend for the Aerobic Power peaks is going down weeks before I was supposed to be peaking while fitness remains high…***

Hmmm…Why is that?? During the Build period intensity went high as expected, combined with a race or more every week required me to take more rest days, therefore the time spent riding was lower as shown in this next graph. What happens when you take days off and train less? That’s correct, you lose some of your condition. This is sometimes wrongly attributed as “peaking too early.” As described in my engine analogy here, you simply lose volume so as that happens you have to work harder to obtain the same power, until you need to work way past the redline.

On the positive side you can see that the last part of the season although I had lower fitness, my Aerobic Power was close to the levels at the end of the previous period. Base training paid off.

Next season, my racing calendar would look similar, so couple of things I would pay attention to:

1. Maintain my Aerobic Fitness once intensity becomes high; 1x2h at low intensity weekly should be sufficient, maybe even replace a higher intensity training.

2. Specificity; my priority goal was a TT, so I should train towards than one event, including practice time trials instead of focusing on fitness alone.

***Right at this time I switched from a Powertap to an SRM power meter. I found it strange that numbers were becoming lower (the SRM should be ~5% higher because it has no chain friction losses as compared to a hub power meter). I naively attributed the downward pattern to possible calibration issues.

Conclusions

• Base training is immensily important
• If you want to improve you need to learn from experience and yes, from mistakes.
• It is a constant feedback between you, the power meter and the data. Data should be viewed as a whole.
• Trends sometimes start unnoticed and cannot be fully evaluated until the dataset is complete (at the end of season for example). Therefore past experience and knowledge already out there is important. If you start noticing decline in power numbers over time, go back and reevaluate what is your training lacking? Are you overtraining? Are you recovering enough? Are you sick?
• Trends can and do explain your performance. Numbers don’t lie!

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