Video from last night's DISC session
What we did ...
I'm focussing a lot of us older guys who train in the Sprint Squad on legspeed and power at higher cadences, one way to do this is to do a motorpaced drill called a "windout", where, on a small (or at least, not a big gear) gear we follow the motorbike through a flying 200 windup, then a flying 200 entry line, chase the bike for a set number of laps while it speeds up at every corner. This doesn't use up our power getting to speed so it saves us for high cadence high power work, where we rarely get to train without the aid of a motorcycle (or, on the road, down hills). Last night our main drill was a 500m windout with the motorbike pulling off at 100m to go, the rider then has to try and accelerate (or, at least hold speed) for the last 100 meters.
That's what it looks like from the back of the motorbike ...
Here's my power meter data for one of my efforts from this session (I did 4 of them, all on 90"). As you can see, I am not very fast or powerful (and am even worse than I was last summer, but I have some mittigating circumstances! Injury has taken quite a toll this year so far, but I am on the mend!). Compare this to the week before, where we just did windouts without the motorbike pulling off at 100 to go (ie: chasing all the way in the draft). The power at the last 10 seconds is the interesting part. Here's the charts :
500m windout with rider unassisted for the last 100m | |
500m windout with draft to finish |
And here's the last month or so's overall power figures (it's a funny slice of a graph!)
It's a long way down from my best (~1550 watts peak), but it is going up, and that's encouraging. This is all post my back injury that dropped my peak power down to the sort of numbers an enduro would sneer at! (800 watts! You must be joking!) ... As long as it keeps going up, as are my lifts in the gym, slowly but consistantly, I'm happy. I have abot 5 months to get some speed before the next Summer Sprint Series. Keep on trucking.