I’ve been trying to make sense of my archived power data since I have some free time now…
It is not difficult to analyze indoor workouts after you are done, but what about races and hard group rides?
When I’m indoors I have a target and I either comply or don’t, the power is very easy to read and Ican spot what I did wrong. During my first race the power was just a spiky mess going back and forth between active recovery and anaerobic.
Do you look at your power files at all after a race? What do you typically look for?
This is just my newbie racer take, but I’m trying to concentrate on a low average power vs people that finish in in my group. Means I’m being efficient and not sticking my head out in the wind too much.
Obvi how your race unfolds will change that - but figure this is a good skill to be learning at the beginning. If I can’t be efficient and can’t recover, then I’m never going to be in a position to win eventually.
I haven’t done this, but I may look at repeatability of hard efforts. How many matches you burn above a certain power threshold.
If I feel like I couldn’t have gone any harder, I’ll look for my NP over the race, or over the hardest hour of the race.
I’ll also divide the race up into sections and look at the NP from each, to see if I was fading or finishing strongly.
I’ll use it to analyse failure - what average or normalised power had I been doing in the 1/3/5/10 minutes of a race chaingang leading up to the point where I got dropped? What HR did I reach? Should it have been within my capabilities to hold the wheel at that point or were they just too good for me?
This is really the best case I’ve found for looking back at a race - go back and look at the decisive moments of the race - either where you made a successful move or a move went that you couldn’t go with because of a physical limit (moves/decisives things where you chose not to go are different) and look at the preceeding power and HR numbers. Look at what made you unable to follow and try to figure out how to adjust your training so you won’t fail in a similar situation next time