Odd Down Winter Series: week 1

Rapha Nadal wrote:

Do you think that the white knee warmers might be a detriment to performance?

Hmm, they're not even quite white any more, and when i put them on they were more or less indistinguishable from my pasty skin. might break out the black ones for next week

PRSboy wrote:

How important is w/kg, compared to simply watts in a flat crit?

Hopefully the forecast will improve for you!

depends. at castle combe, which is a motor racing circuit and you can basically go full gas the whole way round, i can sit in a 3rd cat race without really trying that hard and it's mostly about who's got the biggest sprint. at odd down, where there are at least two and usually three and sometimes four hard efforts to stay on, it becomes much more important. it's not the be-all and end-all, but it's a useful benchmark

Jimmy Ray Will wrote:

PRSboy wrote:

How important is w/kg, compared to simply watts in a flat crit?

Hopefully the forecast will improve for you!

As mentioned, it depends on the circuit. On a really tight crit, crit, or a circuit with any real lump, then watts per kilo are important. 

However, for me its not so much your sustainable w/KG, its what W/KG number you have to hit to match the accelerations. 

And this is where being lighter isn't always the obvious answer. If you are making 12W/KG efforts to match accelerations, at 75kg thats 900w. If you lose 5kg, which is a big weight drop, you only lose 60w from your effort. The physiological demands of 840w compared to 900w are pretty much identical so the weight loss will be minimal. 

The focus for circuit racing (apart from say Castle Combe and Thruxton) should be developing the ability to make repeated 5-15sec 10W/KG efforts with short recovery periods.

It is very rare in any circuit race where you will be pressing on the pedals for more than say 45secs in any one go... so from that you can assume that all efforts are way over threshold, so its that anaerobic zone where you should focus your time. This requires muscle resiliance and lactate tolerance. 

However to counteract the above, sustainable power is also vitally important for crit riding although you'll never ride at that effort. Basically the higher your threshold, the closer the efforts will be to your threshold and therefore more sustainable. 

But its not all about making big efforts, the biggest tool any crit rider can have is the ability to avoid making or reduce the length of big efforts. Good bunch positioning, cornering speed, understanding what efforts to follow, which to leave etc. will make more of a difference than any training can. 

yeah this is all good advice. i kind of touched on the anaerobic focus when i was saying that i haven't really done enough sprint efforts. like you say, though, a rising tide lifts all ships. so better W/kg at FTP will probably mean that the bigger efforts get easier. And of course, race craft is a big part of a good performance too. I did alright at that on Saturday, while i had the legs