Hey everyone, I should be picking up a powertap wheel this week, and am planning on pairing it with a Garmin Edge 500. I am on a mac, and I was wondering what most people are using for analyzing/tracking their training. I know that WKO+ is the big dog on the pc, but unfortunately it is not available on the mac. I've heard people mention Golden Cheetah, but how does it stack up to WKO+? Does it offer the same sort of tracking as WKO (CTL, ATL, TSS, etc.)? If there are any other good power programs for the mac, fill me in...

Thanks for the help!

I use WKO w/ vmware fusion and tinyxp. works perfectly and doesn't lag the system at all.

Yea I was thinking about doing that, but that is going to cost more $$ than I have available right now (stretching a little so that I can start training with power). I'd have to get an xp license, a fusion license, and a wko license...all of which isn't exactly cheap. I do have an old xp machine, but I'd rather not use it if I can avoid it.

Golden Cheetah. It has most everything that WKO+ does and it's ... FREE! Seriously, try it out, it's excellent.

Golden Cheetah and / or Ascent.

You can do Parallels and Windows if you have the Intel processor. I have Windows 7 on my Mac, it works fine.

Awesome. I have it downloaded and took a quick look at the ui, but without using it it's hard to tell what it can do. I have to wait until I get my wheel to really try it out. Does it do ctl, atl and tss?

Buy a cheap ass netbook and run everything power related on that.

So you bought tim's wheel eh? Cool.

If you really want CTL, ATL, and TSS but the software doesn't do it. You could get the formulae for numbers and graph those on excel or other spreadsheet prog for free.

$$! Like I said just getting the pt + garmin is a stretch, so even a $200 netbook is out of the question (right now). Maybe down the road I will get one and use it for power and as my note taking machine for college.

The GC Performance Manager tracks STS, LTS and SB. (short and long term stress, stress balance).

TSS is trademarked, so GC uses BikeScore to calculate a ride's stress. BikeScore is calculated in a different way but comes up with very similar results. STS, LTS and SB are calculated from BS using the same algorithms that WKO uses to creata CTL, ATL and whatever the stress balance acronym in WKO is, from TSS.

At least for me, LTS and CTL from WKO are very close, like within a couple percent. That's probably closer than the accuracy of TSS or BS in representing stress.
I contributed the Performance Manager to GC last year.

FIT file support is in the developer builds (works great, I've been using it since I got a Garmin 500). It'll be in 1.4, which should be available soon.
If you can't build source yourself, read the mailing list- there are developer builds of proto-1.4 that are available for download.

I find that GC 1.3 is as good as WKO 2.2. 1.4 should be a bit better. I have not tried WKO 3.0.

Yea pretty much. I haven't sent the $$ yet, I'm waiting on shipping costs from psimet. But that should all happen in the next few days. Rob is letting tim borrow a pt while he builds tim's new wheel, so I don't have to wait . Rob + Tim are good people for sure.

Thanks for the info. I don't really care about the terms, and as long as the results are close, I should be all set. I don't know how to build from source, but it would be neat to learn. I like supporting open source, and the GC developers seem motivated to make it better, which is awesome. If I try GC once I get my pt and I'm not happy, maybe I will spring for either parallels or a netbook to run wko on, but I think I'll be happy with gc.

Having downloaded one of the 1.3 builds, I concur with eridm979. GC get's better and better. I'm no longer wishing I had WKO+. We'll, since I have an old PPC Mac, I can't import .fit files. Hopefully this will be available in 1.4 for PPC Macs.

How do you set FTP in GC?

tools -> options -> athlete -> set Critical Power.

Andrew Coggan, one of the authors of "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" has contributed to GoldenCheetah as well as a wealth of others. Great Program.

I have 1.3 installed and I don't see that option... Maybe it is because I haven't imported any power files yet?

Could very well be.