Originally Posted by
PeteHski
For me it's quite important that my bike PM correlates well with my indoor trainer PM. Fortunately they are always within a couple of percent and both are consistent. They could both be reading power in units of chicken-power for all I care. I find both PMs massively useful for both training and events and you would probably class me as a "weekender". The only bike I don't have a PM on is my mtb, as I don't really think it would be a lot of use for the casual trail riding I do on it. But on my road bike a PM really helps me to pace long Sportives and mountain climbs etc. I'm not sure anyone thinks a PM will enable them to do something that requires "genetic blessing" as you put it!
I care about whether they read in chicken-power because in order to test their accuracy, I measure the difference in reported power when adding a known mass, or climbing a known height, at different known speeds. It's a lot easier to do that in watts than in chicken-power.
Pacing can actually be important (but it's more about the distribution of work than raw power). One of the earliest things I learned from using power is that my previous pacing using RPE was way off. Having accurate power data (not just consistent) helped me to learn when to trust my RPE and when not to, so I learned how to "re-calibrate" RPE. That's especially important near threshold, so having accuracy near threshold was important to me.
Originally Posted by
aclinjury
I see your points, all valid. I consider myself a weekender. I used to train a lot 18 hrs/wk, and was holding 4.5-4.6 w/kg on an hour mtb climb (peaks over 7000 ft elevation). This would make me a solid cat 3 climber. But for me to maintain this w/kg, it requires a lot of training. Fast forward 4-5 years later, I've lost a bit of interest in all the structure training and power stuff. I hit the gym, packed on 5 pounds of muscles, and cut back my cycling hours to ~10 hrs/wk. And incidently this morning, I decided what the heck let's do a 20min interval, didn't really have a wattage goal for the interval at all, just went by leg feeling, and to my pleasant surprise, I keep the exact same power I did 4-5 years ago, granted i did gain 5 pounds, but I also felt like with the weight gain my "perceived effort" was a tad easier too. So, I guess what I'm sayin here is that, for my case, I didn't seem to lose much fitness after plateauing 4-5 years ago.
So now, I'm thinking, maybe after a certain point of training gains that your genetics have allowed, then the continual rigorous trainng and use of a PM... is probably a just like to give the same result as a loser training routine, and even without a power meter. That's why I asked the question earlier, "would a more accurate PM allow a weekender to train better than a less accurate PM". In my personal anecdote, I'd say... probably not likely.
I mostly agree, which is why I say that one of the least demanding uses for power data is training. That's why I keep saying that you can train pretty effectively with just a wristwatch and a regular training route, and why I think a single-sided power meter is fine for many riders. However, I think the real value of power data comes from doing things you can't do with a wristwatch, like drag reduction (but there are others, depending on what kind of weekend warrioring you do).
As an anecdote, I've never done 18 hrs/week of riding. The most I've ever done for an extended period was maybe 12 hrs/wk, and I was at my fittest. Then I changed jobs, and got married, and soon after we were expecting a child, so my riding time got cut a lot. That's when I bought a power meter. I was using the power meter not to get faster, but to learn how to cut out "inefficiency" in training time. I was able to stay very close to my former speeds and times on half as much riding -- but I couldn't keep it up for hours and hours as I had before. So I never actually got faster with power -- I stayed almost the same on half the riding. Now, of course, I'm much slower, and the kid is going to graduate from college next spring. So I'm old, fat, and slow; but if I do all these crazy things, there are times when I'm just old and fat.