A Deeper Look into my Nationals TT

I'm not a person that goes on about 'could have, should have, would have', what's done is done and I always try to look forward. This does not mean, however, that there are no lessons to be learnt from the past, one should try not to repeat the same mistake twice. As they say, experience is the ability to recognise a mistake when you make it again.

Alex Simmons is an Australian cycling coach who is a regular and respected contributor on various forums and mailing lists that discuss training with power (check out his blog at http://alex-cycle.blogspot.com/). He has developed a tool and methodology for designing an optimal pacing strategy for a given TT course. I asked him to have a look at the data from my Nationals TT for 2 reasons. Firstly to see how well I paced the course, and secondly to try to assess the impact that my rubbing brake block had on my overall time. His analysis makes use of a technique for estimating CdA and Crr called Virtual Elevation (see http://tinyurl.com/kpeyx6).

Based on the profile of the course, an isopower (constant power) pacing strategy may not be optimal. He uses the Normalised Power algorithm as well to figure out how hard the rider should go on the climbs, and how much to back off on the descents. The following graph shows the optimal pacing strategy for the Nationals TT course, and my power output overlaid.

Interesting to see the correlation, even though I didn't pre-prepare my pacing strategy. I'm really pleased with my physical performance, there is not much more I could have done from a pacing perspective, as shown in the following table which ranks my performance against various benchmarks.

The really interesting part of the analysis comes from the figure Alex had to use for my Crr (coefficient of rolling resistance). In order to get the virtual elevation model to balance (i.e start elevation and end elevation to match up), he had to use a Crr value of 0.018. A more typical value of 0.005 would have resulted in a time improvement of 4m20s.

Hopefully I don't need to point out the moral of this particular story!

Thanks to Alex for doing the analysis for me, I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad!