Well..Im pealing my sweaty body off my bike after my first Wattage test. Test like these can only be described as a controlled beating, if your not fond of time trialing these are tough, and doing them inside only adds to the stress level. Outside test are a little better you have more to focus on and are just mentally easier, Ill talk more about that later, right now I’m now going to find out what is inside Pandora’s box. You dont know already, you ask? No, actually i don’t, with advice from a close friend, adviser and power user for many years, he suggested i cover the wattage on the CP head unit, why? to keep me from trying to race a number. It worked as i rode blind for the test, its No surprise as there is very little light deep inside this type of pain cave.
Well the number as i wrote previously I had it broken down into three ten minute splits, The variations for the first two were 4 watts difference, i dropped four Watts, Not too surprising, Yea i was getting tired, alright how about minutes 20-30? Thats were it gets messy, I dropped another eight to ten. Pass or fail? A or E? Ill call it a B- . What i found out over the years is testing gets better the more you do it, like anything the first time isn’t all ways the best, it takes time to perfect the art of knowing your body, How to relax, control your breathing when your nearing the point sub max effort. What constitutes a pass or fail test? Had i dropped more than 15-20 watts over the last fifteen minutes i would of found that I had went too hard, too early on. Had I increased the same amount over the same period of time i would have probably started too conservative. So the loss of 12 15 watts was a break even.
I was tired but happy to have gotten the first phase of my journey into the world of Watts out of the way . Now what the heck do i do with these numbers? Good question. check back and ill give you an update.
