Like Armstrong, he’s on a power trip

Golfers can measure their progress in strokes. Marathoners can map out their improvement in minutes. And weightlifters can track their strength in pounds. But what’s a bicyclist to do?

Elite and weekend riders alike used to record their workouts by monitoring average speed, heart rate and perceived exertion. Yet speed can be thrown off by wind resistance and elevation gain, heart rate can be affected by such factors as caffeine and weather, and your own assessment of exertion is subjective and unscientific. What’s more, none of it tells you if you’re actually getting in better cycling shape.

To solve this problem, a growing number of recreational riders are strapping wattage meters on their handlebars, taking advantage of comparatively lower prices for the gizmos and the promise of unrivaled workout data.

A power meter, as wattage meters are also known, offers a precise snapshot of true effort, an apples-to-apples comparison of fitness from one day to the next. If you can put out an average of 225 watts for 30 minutes in June, and 250 watts for 30 minutes in July -- both at the same heart rate -- you are in fact pushing the pedals more than 10% harder. That’s why a number of trainers and athletes are convinced power meters will soon replace heart rate monitors as the favored sports gadget, especially for pursuits such as cycling, in which power is so easily recorded. Newer stationary bicycles display wattage.

“Wattage is a true indication of what your body is doing,” said Lance Armstrong, who relied on a wattage meter to prepare for his seven consecutive Tour de France victories, in a recent interview. “To me, it’s nice to train with wattage. But what’s even more useful is to test with wattage.

“Say you have one hill in your neighborhood. And however often you want to test, you do that climb at a maximum effort, and you take the average of the watts [for each ride]. Then you are setting benchmarks of whether or not you are improving. That’s how I know that my wattage is where it needs to be, that I am getting stronger, and that I am ready to win.”

Unlike Armstrong, I didn’t want to use my wattage meter to win anything. All I wanted to find out was if I could become a faster, fitter cyclist. And I wanted to try this with a coach whom I would hardly ever see in person.

The course ahead

The Angeles Crest Century is a punishing ride of nearly 100 miles and about 11,000 feet of climbing, grinding up from La Canada’s foothills to the lofty ski resorts of the San Gabriel Mountains.

After training myself with no guidance or plan, I had finished the 2004 ride in what I considered a respectable time of 6 hours and 57 minutes. The course for 2005’s Angeles Crest Century was identical, so this year’s ride offered a perfect yardstick to test six months of training with a PowerTap SL from CycleOps, the wattage meter I had installed on my bike.

Though some meters are built into a bike’s cranks, the PowerTap SL ($1,199) is part of the rear hub. Regardless of the manufacturer, power meters work the same basic way. By gauging infinitesimal strains, or torque, placed on a bike’s components, they constantly determine a rider’s physical output in watts, a measure of power done in a specific time.

During a ride, the meter sends that data to a sophisticated cyclometer mounted on the handlebars. In addition to tracking current, average and maximum watts, the unit also logs speed, pedal cadence, ride time, distance and, with a chest strap monitor, heart rate. After the ride, you slip the cyclometer into a cradle linked to a personal computer, which uploads the data and transforms it into an easy-to-read spreadsheet displaying everything from the total calories burned to your average and maximum heart rates.

That spreadsheet then can be transmitted via the Internet to an online coach, thus allowing the coach to badger you for not trying hard enough even if he’s 1,000 miles away.

My coach, Rick Babington, who works with Colorado’s Carmichael Training Systems (founded by Armstrong’s trainer, Chris Carmichael) and USA Cycling, is local and is not much for badgering. In our first training session, Babington rode beside me, gently coaxing me to go faster. But outside of that training session, and the occasional time I joined in Babington’s 50-mile weekend group rides, my coach might as well have been training me from the Rockies.

That kind of long-distance coaching has become increasingly popular, thanks to the amount of ride data you can now relay via the Internet. I picked Babington because he led a terrific spinning class at the local Equinox Fitness Club, but I could have selected any number of online coaches.

Babington’s goal in our first session together last March was to determine the highest point of exertion I could maintain during a three-mile ride. Those figures -- 265 watts, at an average heart rate of 170 beats per minute -- helped establish my maximum sustainable power at lactate threshold, or LT, the point at which muscles produce lactate acid faster than the body can clear it. Exercise above that level for even a minute, and you will soon feel as if you are climbing Mt. Everest -- without oxygen.

“The goal,” Babington said, “is to push your LT higher, and to produce more watts at or below your LT.”

In other words, be stronger with less exertion. It sounded simple. What followed, though, was six months of dozens of often agonizing workouts, all duly recorded by my power meter, an effusive friend on good days and a backstabbing snitch on bad ones.

Input and output

To improve my wattage, Babington focused on workout intervals, measured in what’s called critical power. Critical power is wattage over a defined time period.

For 30 minutes climbing a mountain, Armstrong can turn out nearly 500 watts. (That kind of fitness is beyond my comprehension; I can’t maintain 500 watts for even half a minute.) Sprinters may have remarkably high critical power figures for a few seconds, though endurance racers can maintain a strong power output for half a day.

Babington’s training program, at a monthly fee of $175, aimed to improve my wattage in eight time periods, from a minimum of 12 seconds to a maximum of three hours. After I had uploaded a month of rides, we were both able to see how much power I could produce during any single interval. We then tried to make each of those power numbers go up.

Every week, Babington would prepare a week’s worth of workouts and post them on a website. On a given day, I might log on to my computer to see a training plan from Babington saying, “On a 4-6% hill do 4-5 x 3 minutes at CP6 (3 minute recoveries). Then 20 minutes at CP60 on mostly a flat course.” In English, that meant climb a good hill five straight times at an average wattage of 280, with a short break in between, and then cruise along for a while at an average wattage of 230.

Within a month, my wattage figures across all time periods showed steady improvement. Just as Babington predicted, I was able not only to produce more watts at a lower average heart rate, but also to ride longer -- ultimately for two hours -- with my heart rate at 170 and higher. More importantly, I could instantaneously tell in the middle of any ride how hard I was working, just by looking at my cyclometer’s average watts readout. It was the most useful real-time motivation imaginable.

When the coach is away ...

There was one problem, however: Babington wasn’t physically present to crack the whip and get my butt in the saddle. After a month of loyally completing almost all of his prescribed drills, I started to miss workouts. That slacking off wouldn’t have happened if my coach were in front of my house, waiting. Furthermore, riding with the companionship of a wattage meter isn’t nearly as motivating as an outing with other cyclists.

I was nonetheless riding enough -- when work and family allowed, as many as four times a week for a total of about 10 hours in the saddle -- that my progress continued. In August on an energetically paced 32-mile ride up and down the Angeles Crest Highway, I set new personal bests for five critical power segments. Over the course of my training, I had shed six pounds; my bike truly felt faster.

The PowerTap was not without its bugs. It would occasionally record wattage figures that not even the Incredible Hulk on steroids could produce, which meant you had to stop and reset the unit. (PowerTap’s manufacturer says that kind of malfunction is very rare.) And Floyd Landis, a Tour de France racer who competed with a PowerTap, saw his cyclometer fly off its mount in one of this year’s Tour stages.

Still it’s an invaluable tool for riders eager to find new ways to improve performance. Wattage meters “are going to be the standard,” said Dr. Shannon Sovndal of the coaching company Thrive HFM. “It’s what cycling has been looking for.”

It turned out to be what I was looking for too. Despite an agonizing final climb up the 5,710-foot Mt. Wilson, my time for the Angeles Crest Century early this October was 6 hours and 38 minutes. I was about 20 minutes faster than the year before -- an improvement, I believe, directly attributable to all of the spreadsheets my wattage meter had cranked out, as I hadn’t logged nearly as many training miles before this year’s ride as I had before the 2004 edition.

Babington, of course, deserved the real credit. Even though he was not riding with me, he had paced me up the San Gabriel mountains. His online regimen (and e-mails of encouragement) had given me stronger legs than I’d ever had before. And I had a readout to prove it.