OK, so now that I've got the power.....
What do I do with it?
Currently taking the approach suggested by Ewan over on Strava (i.e. pretty much ignoring it, and just gathering some baseline data - so Saturday's race was done on feel as usual, but now have some useful metrics to start looking at).
Also, have a book to read to try and understand more about what to do with it (thanks, Ian).
So.... when I want to look at the numbers, where is the best place?
Current options:
- Strava - found this quite handy analysing the race - e.g. I can see that my second outbound leg was a good 20w down on power whereas the second return leg was pretty much the same as the first (why... headwind vs. tailwind?... feeling a bit sick (actually no - that was the whole race)... tired... etc). OK, so all a bit unscientific - but useful for being able to compare parts of rides, particularly as the whole of Surrey is massively littered with handy segments and link it back to the real world.
- Training Peaks - currently use this as my main repository of training data - but only have the freebie version, as the premium version seems to be £££ - it it worth investing?
- Endomondo - have largely stopped using this, as my laptop threw a wobbly about talking to it, and having so many places that my data is going anyway, i couldn't be bothered to look into fixing it
- Golden Cheetah - freebie; know one of the developers, so have a target for all my dumb questions; looks complicated!
- something entirely different?
Thoughts?
At least I have a good FTP test from Saturday for real rather than virtual power - though the TrainerRoad app on my phone was trying to be far too clever for its own good, and refused to use virtual power when it could see a perfectly good power meter in front of it... not even sure how it decided it was mine, and didn't belong to the bloke parked next to me... so probably need to now adjust the targets on all my turbo sessions.
So much to think about....
Damn - I also realise that I will need to standardise pedals between bikes - otherwise, swapping over cranks will be a pain in the proverbial...