One of my favorite scenes in "Overcoming" is when they're trying to get Sastre to ride at a certain wattage and he won't. After yelling at him a little, he looks at the computer in the team car and says, "I don't have to understand the computer, the computer has to understand me!" I bet he didn't know his ctl when he won the tour.

Not to say the numbers aren't important, but I'd hazard a guess that the average weekend warrior with a powertap gets way more wrapped up in them than they need to.