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Old 05-16-17 | 09:26 AM
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Seattle Forrest
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Joined: Mar 2010
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From: Seattle, WA
There's a bit of a learning curve to riding with power.

You can try to learn everything ahead of your meter arriving, but that's difficult. There are a lot of concepts and terms to memorize (variability index = normalized power / average power, completely useless without knowing your FTP), and until you have some context, it's just alphabet soup.

You're probably better off riding as normal with your meter and occasionally paying attention to the numbers it gives you. See what 100 watts and 200 watts feel like. Before long, your next step is to determine your functional threshold power, which you can do through testing or with software guessing. With that, pay attention to the normalized power and intensity factor and training stress scores that summarize your rides. Pretty soon everything will come together and make easy sense.

But if you'd like to try to tackle everything first, Training Peaks has some articles, and there are lots of books on the subjects like Training and Racing with a PM.
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