Turbo Trainer Advice

Heh, I was coming out of the hairpins at ~380 watts, then pretty much freewheeling.

^^ I'm confused now - aren't you talking about % of FTP, whilst Dammit is simply referring to the required wattage?

SF is saying that for Bothwell to have cycled up the hill to my house (to pick up a pedal spanner) she'd have needed to be outputting 250% of her FTP- which is challenging, if the figure of 98 watts is correct.

It's clearly not, is the point.

Unless, of course, Bothwell weighs 30kg.

In which case, we better pray that hippy never meets her.

I walked up that hill, I'm just saying. I only got back on my bike as I approached your house so I wouldn't feel too humiliated.

Heh, I was coming out of the hairpins at ~380 watts, then pretty much freewheeling.

You are more mature, and sensible than me. I cant stand to see someone pull away from me. Which given my mediocre abilities is frequently painful, and seldom sensible.

^^ I'm confused now - aren't you talking about % of FTP, whilst Dammit is simply referring to the required wattage?

I was just translating Dammits figure to % FTP to give anb idea of how it would feel if the 98watt FTP was correct. I kinda assumed Dammit mentioned the hill, because Bothwell had cycled it before.

SF is saying that for Bothwell to have cycled up the hill to my house (to pick up a pedal spanner) she'd have needed to be outputting 250% of her FTP- which is challenging, if the figure of 98 watts is correct.

Ah, that makes more sense.

Bothwell - ur doin it wrong.

Slaining is never wrong

It's not a fun hill.

This needs sorting though. I havent touched my turbo for weeks. Mainly because my speed/cadance sensor broke, and I cant use virtual power on trainerroad. This would irritate the hell out of me.

Slaining is never wrong

I meant the turbo/power calculations.

Walkengering is an extremely efficient technique for hill climbing.

This needs sorting though. I havent touched my turbo for weeks. Mainly because my speed/cadance sensor broke, and I cant use virtual power on trainerroad. This would irritate the hell out of me.

This. It's the Wrongness of it that's annoying me now.

FWIW that "98w" effort left me properly shaking with exertion afterwards in the kind of way that doesn't ever seem to happen during hill climbs on the road. I was trying to maintain the power that trainerroad was telling me to maintain, but obviously couldn't sustain it as it seems to be calculating my actual power output far too low.

Here is my session: http://www.trainerroad.com/cycling/rides/348150

That's based on the starting FTP of 200 before anything is calculated. You can see from the start that I began by maintaining the power demanded of me, but as it started to ramp up to about 120W I wasn't able to sustain it. In the middle of the first high cadence effort I just thought "fuck it" and started ignoring the numbers it was giving me as targets. The two max effort spikes of about "156W" were me really giving it the beans. Which, again, seems like a very low wattage for perceived exertion.

The whole thing is giving me OCD rage.

Borrow a power meter, ignore the guesstimates?

That would have been brutal. Your rest periods arent rest periods, and your pushing over 180 bpm during the test sections.

Heres mine. Note the difference in power for resting, and my mere 165bpm during the test periods. Much more civilised. It fecking hurt enough though.

http://www.trainerroad.com/cycling/rides/304592

It needs redoing really. Its not very smooth.

Borrow a power meter, ignore the guesstimates?

Yes - TW2 has kindly offered me a loan of his Powertap wheel so I'll be able to use that to get some realistic data that I can then use to calibrate the stupid turbo settings with.

That would have been brutal. Your rest periods arent rest periods, and your pushing over 180 bpm during the test sections.

Heres mine. Note the difference in power for resting, and my mere 165bpm during the test periods. Much more civilised. It fecking hurt enough though.

Yeah, that looks a lot more normal, there's actual differences between the intervals in yours. There's no way I'd have ever been able to hit those higher points during my session, I'd have totally blown. There's about 7 trainers in the profile drop down that sort of match mine (although none match it exactly), so one of them is bound to match. Surely.

Yes - TW2 has kindly offered me a loan of his Powertap wheel so I'll be able to use that to get some realistic data that I can then use to calibrate the stupid turbo settings with.

This going to correct your obviously wrong FTP. Just change your settings to powermeter, and trainerroad will take power readings from that via Ant+.

Your still going to need to find the correct powercurve though.

Spend an hour at different settings / speeds, and graph all the things. That should give you a decently calibrated power curve that you can either plot your efforts against yourself, or you can find a reasonable proxy for on trainerroad / elsewhere.

, or you can find a reasonable proxy for on trainerroad / elsewhere.

Thats not a bad idea. For the sake of having your intervals laid out for you. You dont need absolute accuracy. In fact if the proxy is half decent you could do a virtual FTP, to use in your virtual trainerroad sessions.

If this seems to change. Reborrow the powertap, and find out your new FTP for real world use (ie. posting on interweb forums)

Actually. If you set your FTP as 98 in TrainerRoad, and use the same set-up that got you that number. I bet you'd get a nice workout fro TrainerRoad. The ramping up and down of effort will be off. But not by loads.

It's not a fun hill.

x100

That hill is Satan's own work. I don't envy you having to get up that everyday.

[Neitsche quote from Conan]

Is it steeper than my driveway?

Riding the cargo bike up that with the kids on the back will be the death of me....
....and then them of course, as we hurtle backwards back into the road.

I went up his hill once. Actually twice in one day.
Still get nightmares.

^ Euph?

Picked up TW2's powertap wheel today. As I was shuffling stuff about to prepare to get another turbo session running, this time with proper measurements, I realised that the trainer was set to the wrong (read: higher) resistance setting, so I plugged the wrong, lower setting into fucking trainerroad on that last test. I must have changed the setting on the turbo while fannying about and then totally forgot about it because I'm an absent minded twat.