You are reading a single comment by @gbj_tester and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@gbj_tester
What it says is that he made pacing errors in long tests before - perhaps unsurprising as he's not really a tester in the traditional sense, he's a pursuiter turned road man. He used a powermeter to guard against making the same error again.
This is not directly contrary to my earlier post, since directly reading power is much more reliable than the poor proxy, HR. If he's a fairly normal person, his HR could have been 5-10bpm higher at the end than at the start for the same power output, due to cardiac drift http://www.tri247.com/article_2276.html
However, constant power is not necessarily the optimum pacing strategy; since you lose more time on the slow bits than you can ever make up on the fast bits, it is usually better to use more resource on the slow bits, within the constraint of not exceeding your limit. On a typical rolling UK course, that means your perceived effort should be a bit higher going up hill, and you can recover a bit going down the other side once you're up to speed again.