The Power Meter Handbook: A User’s Guide for Cyclists and Triathletes

beyond your need for understanding how to use your power meter. The deep stuff, however, doesn’t begin to show up until we get to the section titled “Power and Periodization.” If peak performance is not your thing—if you’re riding and racing strictly for fun—then I’d still strongly recommend reading everything up to that point. You’ll come away with a better understanding of training. Of course, you can start into the more advanced parts that come later in the chapter and stop at any time. Then perhaps at some time in thefuture, when you are giving serious thought to a peak performance and have your power meter and its software pretty well figured out, you can return to this chapter and read it all.
    Here we go into the future of training for truly serious athletes.
POWER-TRAINING COMPONENTS
    There are three components that taken together define what training is all about. They are frequency, duration, and intensity. It doesn’t matter if you are a pro who races in the Tour de France or a green novice just trying to get into decent riding shape; these are the only aspects of your workout routine that can be changed. I’m sure this is not news to you. It’s training 101. What I’m going to do here is build on this basic starting point so that by the end of this chapter you will be able to use these concepts along with your power meter and software to produce peak performance for an important race on a specific day. But first let’s make sure that we are in agreement on the three components of training.
Frequency
    Frequency is nothing more than how often you ride. This is the most basic component of training.
    For the novice cyclist, how often he or she rides is the greatest determinant of fitness. Just getting on the bike frequently and riding, regardless of how long or how hard, are the key. This, of course, doesn’t mean riding at high intensities or for long durations. With frequent rides at comfortable intensities and manageable durations, the novice will see steady improvement.
    Frequency is also important for experienced athletes, just not as important as for the novice. You can’t regularly miss workouts, however, and expect to become fitter and faster at any level as an athlete. If you becomelackadaisical about working out and the number of rides you do in a week decreases, significant amounts of fitness are eventually lost. At the highest levels, road cyclists and mountain bikers typically ride at least 6 days a week. That saddle-time consistency has a lot to do with their performance. Interestingly, going from 6 to 7 workouts in a week won’t have much of an impact on fitness. But decreasing frequency from 6 to 5 will cause a noticeable loss of fitness for the advanced rider. I know that doesn’t sound fair. It’s just the way fitness seems to work, I’ve found.
    Training frequency is a great challenge for triathletes. Experienced triathletes typically ride a bit less than experienced roadies or mountain bikers. They are generally on their bikes only 4 or 5 times a week in order to make time for swim and run sessions. The optimal use of limited training time is the greatest conundrum facing multisporters, especially in bike training since the bike leg accounts for about half of one’s finish time over a standard triathlon race distance. For example, if a triathlete finishes an Olympic-distance race in 2 hours, the bike split is roughly 1 hour. For a 12-hour Ironman triathlon, the bike leg is usually completed in around 6 hours. With this in mind, I highly recommend that triathletes spend roughly half of their weekly training time on the bike.
    Frequency is a critical component of effective training whether you use a power meter or not. It accounts for half of what we call “volume”—the total number of hours or miles you train in a week. The other half of volume comes from workout duration.
Duration
    How long should you ride? The answer varies according to the kind of events you do. Advanced athletes doing long road races, Ironman triathlons, mountain bike marathons, and centuries typically do one or more of their weeklyrides in excess of 4 hours. This helps to prepare them for the rigors of a long race. If the targeted event is shorter, it’s typical for the length of the longest rides to also decrease. Of course, regardless of race distance, there are likely to be shorter active recovery rides (done in zone 1), which help the athlete bounce back from the previous day’s