BVC-CHAT Another Winderful Ride

[Brett]

Yeah, wattage is the only true way to measure effort.  There's some meters
starting to come in at the $500 range, but I'm not sure about those.  A
decent one can run you $1500 bucks.  I've got a powertap wireless and it
works great, but I hate the thing.  Riding by numbers takes all the fun out
of it for me.

Unlike wattage, heart rate can drift all over the place.  Dehydration can
make it go low, time spent excercising can make it climb high.  My HR when I
finished running today was 170, at about a 9 minute mile.  A 9 minute mile
for me is usually about 145 bpm, but it climbs considerably when trucking
along for a long time.

I sat in a class of 8 people and got a one on one lecture for over an hour
from Dr. Alan Limm in Boulder CO last year - he's the inventor of the
powertap and was the personal coach to Floyd Landis.  He explained to us
exactly how using wattage is far superior than any other method.  Power is
power.  It doesn't lie.  Power meters are getting really popular, so prices
will keep dropping.  In the meantime, HR is an OK method for those who
aren't crazy about having the latest and greatest.

I'll go for a bunch of weeks riding by numbers and then get sick of it and
go for a few rides with nothing but a stopwatch.  It's nice sometimes to
leave all the monitoring crap behind and just ride for the ride's sake.

There's an almost-secret almost-mountain on FM 3090 just east of Navasota.
It's actually got a switchback in it.  It's probably the best climb in the
area.  If anybody knows of another one like that here, share!

On Jan 5, 2008 6:42 PM, Christopher Menzel <cmenzel at tamu.edu> wrote:

> > On Jan 5, 2008 5:23 PM, Ryan Brown <garthhog at suddenlink.net> wrote:
> > By the way, I have another question. When I first got my road bike,
> > it had the Specialized Mondo's on them, which I rode for the first
> > 200 miles. After realizing that they were about as tough as a stick
> > of butter, I switch to the Armadillos and have been happily flat
> > free (minus one occasion). It was when I was running the Mondos that
> > I was faster, and after the Armadillos went on I noticed that I
> > dropped my average speed by about 1 to 1.5 mph. Should there be this
> > much difference in performance between these two tires,
> >
>
> I would *really* doubt it unless you've found a secret mountain to
> climb. :-)  I can tell a difference when I'm on Armadillos rather than
> a racier tire but I really doubt they put much more than a negligible
> dent in my overall speed.  But that's just anecdotal, I've not done
> any serious testing.
>
> -chris
>
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