40 Goals

More Graphing stuff, this time a user-definable 2d scatter plot. Above you will see the average effective pedal force vs Power. Col du Glandon at Marmotte is in blue and Alpe d'Huez is in red. What I'm slightly surprised to find is that the amount of force applied to the pedals is roughly the same when totally knackered (AdH) versus when I was still fresh (Glandon) ... albeit I was suffering from the off. Anyhoo, I'm working on a replay button (the time slider at the bottom) so you can watch how these things change over the course of the ride. This seems particularly interesting when looking at power/heartrate over a long ride (long enough for the 'lag' between CV response and effort to be nullified). Hey ho.

Greg Lonnon has added support to Golden Cheetah for overlaying rides on Google Maps. Major Kudos. He's working on using color etc to highlight different metrics over the ride. The above is my feeble power output color coded. Fortunately there is no legend yet so you can't see how pathetic I was :-)

Update : A Windows installer for Golden Cheetah with Long term metrics support compiled in is available here. Well. Last year's Marmotte was a total disaster. 9 months later I'm beginning to accept that it was a result of a number of things. 1. My training dipped dramatically through June due to work pressures 2. I just didn't do enough (read any) L4 work 3. I'm not actually that great a cyclist The chart above is from some development I've been doing on plotting performance over time for Golden Cheetah. Kind of a back burner activity when I get some spare time. In it, you will see, that over all my training I spent almost no sustained efforts in L4 and camped at the top end of L3 for most of the time. You will also see that my performance plateaued from Feb onwards. So, more intensity required. Update : Here is my peak powers overlaid with time in zone for L3 and L4, you will also see the zones change as my FTP improves. Its kind of a pretty chart but the message i...

It took me 11:09. I may have finished La Marmotte but in return La Marmotte finished me. I won’t be entering another epic european mountainous sportive in this lifetime. Preamble I stayed at Chalet Namika above the main town of Alpe d’Huez. Hosted by Wayne and Ambra I had a thoroughly fantastic stay. The weather was fantastic and the views were breathtaking. It seemed like only yesterday that I was panting my way up the Alpe on my 40th, but here I was again to take part in Europe’s hardest sportive, La Marmotte. When it came to the carbo loading these guys rocked, the food was fantastic and I couldn’t have gotten a better base for the event. Sam and I are alerady talking about returning with the kids to ski in the new year. There were a few guys staying at the Chalet, all of whom were Marmotteers. Some clearly experienced and fit and others less so. I fell into the less so category. Indeed, a couple of trips down to the village of Huez at switchback 7 had my NP of 260 w...