Back to the track and Computrainer testing

Back to the track last night... did two sessions at about 300 watts avg, 15 minutes and 25 minutes. Had to get home so only a short workout.

Former Canadian track star Don Gilmore was over from Vancouver Island tuning up for the upcoming World Master Track meet in Australia. Scott and Sarah Laliberte where there doing the same.

Today was supposed to be outdoors, four hours... weather (rain, lots of rain) intervened.

So I did some testing on the computrainer.

First to see if I could get track bike setup a bit better. I brought it home and compared the setup to road bike (Cervelo Soloist) and the TT bike (P2C). I think the seat was a centimeter too low, and the bars about 1 cm too low and 1 cm too close. Brought the seat up and swapped the 100mm stem for a 110, reversing and dropping it down one spacer.

I then did some computrainer ERG workouts. Specifically the "senior warmup" which is a 10 minute ramp from 150 to 280 watts, then three repeats of two minutes at 100, then one minute at 340 watts, then a cool down.

The new setup seemed to be a little more comfortable and easier to maintain 340 watts for a minute.

I also ran some of the tests with the ergomo so I could compare what it recorded to the computrainer. While not identical, the TSS values where reasonably close (18.7 versus 19.0). The average watts where a little farther apart but normalized power amost identical.

I ended up doing three sets of the "senior warmup". All at fairly high cadence (high cadence is useful for track racing). Average over a 100, as high (during the one minute 350 watt sets) as 120 RPM.

As always these workouts seem (PE) to be much harder than the resulting numbers indicate. (Note that these are ERG workouts, so ignore the distance and speed numbers, they are meaningless, the Computrainer sets load to specific wattage regardless of speed or cadence etc.)

Warmup Senior (203 watts):

Duration: 22:00
Work: 268 kJ
TSS: 19.5 (intensity factor 0.729)
Norm Power: 233
VI: 1.15
Distance: 28.119 km
Elevation Gain: 0 m
Elevation Loss: 0 m
Grade: 0.0 % (0 m)
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 378 203 watts
Cadence: 2 120 104 rpm
Speed: 0 87.6 76.7 kph
Pace 0:41 0:00 0:47 min/km
Altitude: 0 0 0 m
Crank Torque: 0 52.5 18.6 N-m