Maui Velominatus Dave is tapering for this Saturday’s Cycle to the Sun. It is more mass start, time trial to the sun as there is nothing like 3.3 km of continual climbing to sort everyone out by their power to weight ratios. After 2 km of climbing there is no pack and no draft. Everyone climbs as hard as they can and almost everyone is riding alone.
Dave has been training like a bastard. He doesn’t have a coach but he does have a power meter and an analytical mind. As we talked about his up-coming race he could not contain himself any longer, “I don’t know how you and Frank can train without power meters. They are fantastic. They make your bike an extension of your body.”
What? I had never considered this as a possibility. Isn’t this something we all want; the rolling centaur? This is a feedback loop: the brain to the legs to the cranks to the strain gages to the head unit to the eyes to the brain. The bike is getting involved here. The bike is telling you how hard you are riding it. Dude.
Presently I’m just riding with a V-meter. I’ve used heart rate meters and cyclometers but got tired of seeing how slow I was. I wanted to simplify; I wanted an unadulterated ride. Also, I obviously didn’t want to formally train anymore, just do rides that I barely made it home from. Is that training? To quote Roy Knickman*, “you are what you train.” His admonition is something Abandy should take to heart; if all you do is train in the mountains, that’s all you are going to be good at. I might have been just training to barely make it home but really it was not training. Training should be more work and less play.
We all need cycling goals. We all need something to get fitter for, even if the goal is as simple not to get shelled as quickly on that same climb.
Let us be very clear on the idea of training rides versus other rides. A training ride may not be too much fun and most importantly there should be a clear plan for what will happen, see Rule #71. This is where the power meter has to shine; it is the most reliable, direct and accurate instrument for monitoring effort on the bike. The prices are coming down and the model choices are going up. Here is a nice amateur guide for them.
The head unit stays at home on the weekend group ride to the café and back. That ride is why you did the training ride(s) earlier in the week. Don’t try to mix the two or you will be abused. We do the training rides so we can drop our friends on the weekend, that’s what friends do. And nobody wants to be accused of staring at their power meter when they should be looking where they are going, no matter how well they ride.
I am intrigued by the concept of the bike becoming more of an extension of the body through the power meter. Does this violate The Rules? Does this make you a stronger cyclists?
*Who is Roy Knickman? American Hardest of Hardman of the 7-Eleven and La Vie Claire era, FFS.
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@souleur
Amen brother.
The bike becomes an extension of the body through extended meditation and training. The computer does not make it so. The bike is a part of the body when you know instinctively how to unweight the saddle to roll over a bump in the road that only your peripherals saw, or exactly how much to lean on one side of the bars to navigate around an obstacle, or to sense the exact moment you should shift without ever thinking about it. The supple feeling of being one with the machine is not given by the computer. Full stop.
That said, I certainly understand why people use the power meters. It is not a material difference to using a heart rate monitor apart from the fact that it removes the delay from the heart's response to an effort. Its a very good tool and if I was a Pro I would use the fuck out of it.
For me, I enjoy the game of chance that comes with riding on feel; its purely a study of how well I'm reading my body, pushing my limits and seeing what shakes out. Its more fun for me, that is all.
Also, I might add that if you rely on your numbers too much, you will forget how to read your body's signals and sense a bad thing coming. Froome's Stem Staring didn't keep him from a bad day on the Dauphine; my guess would be he was watching numbers and forgetting that his body was trying to ring him to say one of the pistons in the engine room was misfiring.
@Teocalli
Some of the new meters like the Stages are simply a couple of strain gauges on the crank arm. 20g in additional weight but I don't see how would degrade performance as it is only measuring a deflection that is already there .... would be undetectable I would say
Goggles - as a historian I have to ask. Was "bonk" a term cyclists used twenty-five years ago (to describe something happening on the bike, not in the bedroom)?
@Ron
I remember hearing it sunny Scotland in the 1980s, although "the Knock" was a more common term - but that may just have been the more common Scottish variant.
@Ron
Which raises (pardon the pun) the question: can you get the knock while bonking? Some Gatorade and a couple of gels on the bedside table perhaps?
@wiscot
Perhaps in the bedroom the phenomenon is best referred to as "la fringale." Not that I would know from experience, of course.
@The Grande Fondue
To every rule, there is an exception.
@Ron
I first heard the term "bonk" when I ran XC in high school too many years ago. As such, my impression is that "bonk" is a general term for the phenomenon used by American endurance athletes. It is not a cycling-specific term. Accordingly, while we American Velominati know what it means, we should favor other, more cycling specific vocabulary.
@Nate It is a British term as best I can tell from cycling originally. Widely used here in Canada among the cyclists I know ... I first heard it from a local Cat1 God in Vancouver in the late 80's
"Often, people associate the word "bonk" with "hitting the wall" during endurance events. For endurance athletes it is a sudden and overwhelming feeling of running out of energy. You were running or riding along at what seemed like a manageable pace, then seemingly without warning your legs turned to cement. With heavy legs, a body-wide feeling of fatigue and sometimes dizziness, you are forced to stop.
One of the first instances of the athletic term "bonk", came from a film produced by British Transport Films in the mid-1950s in which cyclists noted that if they didn't rest and eat, they would bonk. In other words, they would hit a limit (the proverbial wall) governed by the body and uncontrolled by the mind and sheer willpower. It is said that the feeling was similar to getting hit on the head (bonked on the head) and knocked out of competition."