--
George, I love your enthusiasm for cycling and your willingness to learn and try new things. Understanding power and training with power can really up your game. How your use the power and endurance is up to you. Choosing to train with power is like deciding if you should take the blue pill and return to the matrix or take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
The simulator in the link works pretty well for climbing and no wind. I found that entering wind velocity results in totally bogus answers. In general, most of the simulators are pretty accurate and indicative of the sustained power it takes to do a climb. The reason is the speeds are lower and aero effects are minimized. For climbs, the power calculation is about lifting a known mass up a hill at a constant speed. That is physics 101. It is highly unlikely (99.99%) that you did 414 watts for a sustained effort. A typical sustainable power for a recreational cyclist is 120 to 160 watts. So if you weigh 170 pounds, climb a 6% grade at the rate of 6mph for an hour, you will need about 160 watts continuously for that hour. 160 watts will move a rider on the flat with no wind with hands on the hoods about 17 mph. In general, it takes me about 185 watts to travel 20mph on the flat with hands on the hoods and no wind with a good road surface.
200 watts of sustainable power is very good and 300 watts of sustainable power is a monster. One can see that 400+ watts of sustainable power is achieved by a few of the top riders in the world. The key is sustainable. And that standard is sustainable for an hour. Sustaining anything for an hour is not easy. So if you could climb a 6 mile, 6% grade hill at 6 mph weighing 170 pounds, your functional threshold power FTP would be 160 watts.
If 160 watts is your FTP, that amount of power is hard to make after a few minutes. Talking becomes difficult but possible and breathing is deep but not gasping. You should feel that you could keep this up for another 50 minutes but it was going to be painful That is what FTP feels like.
Once you know what your FTP (zone 4 or z4) is, all power training is based on that value. z5 or VO2 max intervals are done at a power great than 106% of FTP for 2 to 5 minutes. Zone 1 or recovery is 45% of FTP. Heart rate becomes irrelevant and many that train with power do not record HR.
A rider with a 160 watt FTP can surge for a few seconds to 450 watts or so. However, the larger the surge and the greater the duration the more impact it has on the body which you pay for in the future with fatigue and a lessoned ability to surge again.
So what a power meter and power training does is quantify the workout and allow post ride review of the effort. Hence, one can train harder and recover better. The punch line is if you want to train harder and/ or more effective, a power meter will assist you in achieving that goal.
Everyone reading this has a power meter available. It is called a stretch of flattish road, a hill and a timing piece. Climb the hill and record your time. Climb it again and again and each time record your time. If the time is the same on each climb the average power will be about the same for each climb. If you climb it faster, your average power increases. The same is true for a flat stretch of road. The power meter is a way to capture all the information, display your power at any moment in time and take into account wind, road surface and body position. Before power meters, all we had was distance, slope and time.
