Originally Posted by
WhatsYoCadence
See.. I still don't really understand watts. When I go on strava and I see a climb someone did who has a power meter. the KOM never has more than 500 watts. And then I hear all this track talk about 2000 watts. Can anyone give me some watt guidance?
It's like this:
VS this:
or
VS this:
The major difference is TIME.
Sprinters can apply huge amounts of power, but for very short periods of time...like under a minute (hence, the very high max power numbers). The endurance runners won't even be warmed up by the time Sprinters are done with half of their workouts
So, their max wattage is low, but they can ride at a much higher
average power for MUCH longer than sprinters.
The reason you hear about watts so much on the track is because track races are MUCH shorter than in any other discipline of cycling except for BMX.