Why train with a power meter?

In the interest of full disclosure I will note I only have a power meter on my trainer.  It is very expensive and/or inconvenient to have an on board power meter.  This is soon to change.  The company I am waiting for is Brim Brothers who will place the power meter in the cleat of your shoe.  This will be bike independent.  They seem to be the most honest in terms of projecting their delivery date.  Assuming they are reasonable on their price, my money will soon follow.

Now to the point, why train with a power meter?  The easiest place to start with this question is actually running. If I run up a hill one day and on a flat surface another day, these are two very different workouts.  Trainingpeaks refers to this as Normalized Graded Pace and is expected to be available on their web interface (as opposed to their WKO+ software).  Now you might conclude off the cuff, that this is not too much difference.  But at the end of the day, for a triathlete.  In particular we are not simply swimmers or bikers or runners, but a hybrid of the 3.  Lots of little differences add up to big issues.  Are you training hard enough?  Are you training too hard?

At the end of the day we are looking to push our cumulative training load up to the edge and a little past, then back off.  For biking we can use power output.  For running NGP, which uses GPS data to determine workoad.  Ideally for running we could capture wind resistance too, which would give us close to power output.  But with a power meter on the bike and GPS on the run we get pretty darn close to your work effort each workout and the cumulative build up over time.

Now some folks who race faster than me and might even be smarter argue only for heart rate training.  But in the same vein as above many things change heart rate.  The  biggest  immediate factors are diet 24 hours before, temperature the day of and sleep.  So you could finish a workout and say wow I did great, my heart rate was X.  But reality is that you did very little work because your heart rate was elevated from cookies last night and 6 hours of sleep with 80 degrees and humid conditions.

This is not to dismiss heart rate.  It is actually extremely important, but it is one of only several important aspects of determining proper training load.  Thinking of triangulating cell phone positions we need three data points.  For training it makes the most sense to have power, heart rate and perceived exertion.  If we can replace perceived exertion with something less arbitrary we will reach the holy grail.  It might look like power, heart rate and some factor taking into account air temperature, blood pressure, wind resistance and breath rate.  This would require science a bit a past where we are today but is well within reach.

Happy Training!

What Watch Should I Buy for Triathlon?

I mentioned a few posts ago how nothing great exists for triathletes trying to capture all of their performance data.  I decided over Christmas and New Year’s to dig deeper into this after spending some time skiing and running with my buddy Chris who uses the Polar RS800CX Multi.  We assumed his was compatible with the Polar Power Meter WIND (not the greatest power meter, but nonetheless it would create the whole package).  Unfortunately after doing more research I determined you would need a CS600X for the bike and then switch watches for the run.  He confirmed and concluded alas still no single solution exists.  That system would make for 2, $600-ish watches and 2 data uploads.

Then I came home from the mountains to find Triathlete Magazine with reviews of systems.  I thought, oh well saves me time since they wrote my blog.  But these were very superficial and misleading, they claimed the above watch was compatible with the power meter.  These reviews were a total disservice to readers.

So first let me define great as far as I can tell.  In no particular order I would say:

Ant+ – this is the gold standard of data transmission.  Think WIFI for your watch, heart rate, speed, cadence and power.

Ant+ Power – the ability for the watch to read a power meter is imperative, however I will investigate other options given the current situation

HRM – Duh!, this is the only thing available on all options

GPS OnBoard – not having a separate pod for GPS is nice, the cost is a watch you will not wear anywhere else, actually that’s not true since Garmin has a sweet running watch with GPS onboard.

GPS Long, Lat, Elev – if you have GPS, you should get all the data which allows you to upload to Maps

Elevation Change no GPS – watches with barometric altimeters can do this, this is handy for just going out for a run and determining normalized graded pace (this may be a trainingpeaks term).

Bike Speed Cadence – Surprisingly some systems rely solely on GPS and won’t give you cadence

Run Cadence – Ditto to the above

Swim HR – This requires more than a basic chest strap, it needs onboard memory and data transfer capability.

Battery Life – I think 30 hours if it is rechargeable will suffice.

Rechargeable – If you’ve replaced those little CR2032 batteries enough (they look like nickels) you’ll know they’re not cheap.

Memory – 30 hours as well, figure an Ironman takes 17 hours and 24 hour races take I think you can figure that out…30 hours gives some cushion.

Cost – with a power meter I think this whole deal should be under $1,500.  This is still a ginormous price tag when you think about it, but we are asking for great, so $1,500 seems fair given that the 3 closest approximations that are NOT great all cost about that much.

So on to the contenders and I am not going to go into too much detail here as I see this getting long already.  Luckily I built a table in Excel so we can see approximately what this whole deal would look like.

Polar – you would buy 2 watches the RS800CX, CS600X a bike mount, S3 Stride WIND, G3 GPS WIND and Power Output Sensor WIND.  If Polar let the RS800CX read the Power Meter you would be close to great but not ANT+ compatible (WIND is Polar’s Beta/HD DVD vs the world’s VHS/BluRay) and no swim HR (which is low on my list of great)

Timex – the Ironman Bodylink with GPS Pod and Data Recorder 2.  The cheapest of the bunch.  Possibly pair this with a Garmin Edge 500 to get power on the bike but you would be missing run cadence, which is still silly at around $1600 with a cadence sensor and power meter for $1,000 (side note: $1,000 power meters are coming out in June 2010 from Metrigear (built into the pedal, so you can use whatever wheels you want) and Brim Brothers (built into the cleat so you can put your shoes on any bike))

Suunto – t6c Triathlon Pack and GPS Pod, this will get you the swim heart rate but would require the Edge 500 and Power Meter like Timex and set you back closer to $2k…yikes, but Suunto does have sweet heart rate monitors.

Garmin – first buy the Forerunner 50 from Costco for 80 bucks, it gets you the HRM, footpod.  Cadence and the Forerunner 310XT get you to the closest contender with a watch you will not wear anywhere but triathlon.  One thought I have on this now after writing this is to pair a Forerunner 405CX with the Edge 500, this is probably the best solution with a wearable rechargeable watch and better scree, but will be close to $1,750 and no real swim data, lowest on my priority list.

Some other swim options include a sweet swim “watch” Aqua Pulse you could buy that measures heart rate from your earlobe and tells you in your ear (jawbone technology) but is not uploadable to a computer and would set you back $140.  The Aquameter counts laps and strokes and time but is also not uploadable and is $120.  For a triathlete these are probably overkill and based on TrainingPeaks training load methodologies you can get pretty close once you know your 1K Time Trial pace to figuring out how hard you are working with a stop watch and counting laps in your head.  Neither of these would do much for you in an open water tri anyway especially by themselves and certainly don’t seem worth $260 combined.  I’d suggest an MP3 player instead from H2Audio since swimming in the pool is pretty boring.

So the results based on my definition of a great watch are below.  Prices are from Amazon for what all you need.  Green means it’s got it, red sorry not so much.  Some footnotes are included too.

So from the above what I conclude is that the Garmin options are the best.  But they are also the priciest.  What is the difference between Garmin 310XT option and 405CX option?  Well for $275 you get a wearable watch, a dedicated bike computer with better screen, better data recording of bike performance and you don’t have to fool around with moving the watch to the bike and back.  You also have 2 data uploads, but that is no longer a problem thanks to trainingpeaks.  I train with trainingpeaks and they will now accept multiple files and merge them.  Another example of software solving a hardware problem, which also solves using the CS600X and RS800CX from Polar.  Comments on missing info or experiences are more than welcome.

Happy Training!

Bike Trainer vs Cross Trainer

I have a very nice bike trainer down in the basement with a wireless power meter and all kinds of little bells and whistles. It's a fluid trainer so the harder I pedal the harder it gets exponentially (fancy talk for a heckuva lot harder). A bike trainer let's you put whatever bike you like to ride on outside in front of the TV or iPod and ride inside. It gives a lot of useful information and allows for a lot of workouts that cannot be done outside. Most importantly mother nature's weather whims are a non factor, which is great in the winter. The bike leg of a triathlon is the biggest portion of time so you can't really get away with skipping the bike all winter.

Some of the useful parts of a trainer ride are one the power meter. This lets you know how much effort you really are putting out at a particular heart rate. I can't do this on a road bike because convincing my wife of the merits of a $1200 on board power meter would require more endurance than an Ironman. Also a trainer allows me to ride at a consistent pace. I have yet to convince any local communities to wall off traffic for my training rides, so the trainer is the only place red lights don't exist (except of course mountain biking...which could constitute cross training). A trainer is also a controlled environment so no hills or dales (I don't really know what a dale is) and no wind. Lastly drills are easy on a trainer, 30 second spins, single leg pedaling drills (great for working out that kink at the top of your pedal stroke by pushing your toe forward). I've never been successful trying to single leg pedal outside and people give me really funny looks.

So why don't people just ride the trainer all the time? It is i n c r e d i b l y b o r i n g... I mean really boring. After an hour I get really antsy. Magazine or book on my little music stand, tv, movies, ipod...make it bearable. Plus with that boredom, intensity can be hard to muster. So for the motivated athlete who hates the trainer there is hope. Cross Training. Now there are several options. Simply a different form of biking like mountain biking. Or a new thing I am looking at called Cyclocross. This one takes place in the fall on muddy courses. They are basically set up in an obstacle style course with sand pits and walls and other things you have to get off your bike and carry over, around, or through. The bike looks like a road bike but with fatter knobby tires. Never done it...looks real cool. It was featured in this month's Bicycling Magazine.

The other option is to rely on the winter sports. Namely downhill bumps skiing, cross country skiing and snow shoeing. Think of bumps as your intervals. Cross country is your endurance. Lastly snow-shoeing can serve as your tempo. Mix these up with a swim in the pool first or a run after and you have a heck of a brick workout. Part of the pain of Ironman is the fact that you have to go so long 8 to 17 hours. So a solid 6+ hour day of bumps followed by an hour run will give you some serious mental fortitude to draw on when the triathlon season is in full swing. Now you don't get out of riding on the trainer all winter, but these detours do serve as a useful and enjoyable way to not just maintain but improve fitness. Xterra even offers winter triathlons to prove the point...Alpine Skiing/Skinning (cross between downhill and cross country), mountain biking and snow-shoeing are your 3 events.

Happy training!