The Art of the Time Trial

My favorite activity performed on the bike has to be the Time Trial.  It's just you versus the clock.  Some concepts and definitions needing some explanation before going into this further. 

Critical Power or CP - the power you have or predict to sustain for a given time interval. Here you can input values and adjust a CP curve.  http://www.twowheelblogs.com/critical-power-calculator.

Functial Threshold Power or FTP - this is a subset of CP and it's your CP for a 60 minute interval.
A lot of attention is focused on your FTP mainly because a 40kilometer time trial is completed in approximately 60minutes.

CdA - Cd is your drag coefficient while riding and A is your cross sectional area apparent to the wind.  Without getting too technical lets assume you CdA can be calculated as a single value without units, like .32 for example

Power:CdA - P:C - this is the concept that allows you to go faster in the wind.  Either increase your power or decrease your CdA or both to go faster, it's that easy.

There are so many things that go into a successful TT that I'll probably miss a few items in this outline.  This is the order of importance I feel needs be address in order to excel in this specific discipline.

Pacing is a huge topic and the one I think deserves the highest priority in order to get your best time.  There are several considerations for pacing a good time trial.  Course and environmental conditions are most apparent.  What the course profile looks like has the most bearing on your pacing, second to that is the conditions of the day and then your CP. I really can't say things much better than Alex Simmons, Associate Coach, RST in his paper Quantifying the Effective Application of Pacing Strategies in Cycling Time Trial Events: The Pacing Optimisation Index (POI)


Data Analysis is one way to improve your time trialing abilities.  This is how you learn pacing for the course and ways to target your training.  Here are a few tools you can use to help you record and analyse data for later.

Cycling Computers - There are many different kinds that record various degrees of information.  What you want is something that can record at least three metrics.  Distance and Time plus you'll need heart rate or power.  If you go all out you can record; cadence, temperature and elevation.

Strava - You get the app for your phone and record many of the above metrics that cycling specific computers can do.  It's a good tool for comparing time trial data with your cycling community.  It's useful for many different things, but also not very useful. I like it because you can create your own segments and compare your data with others in a nice easy to read format.  Currently this has the cycling community buzzing.  It is not very accurate at calculating your power so it hasn't got to the point of replacing your power meter.

GrEEEEEEN Smoothies

If you haven't tried a nutrient rich greens smoothie you don't know what your missing.  They are packed full of so many good things you might want to throw away your Flinstones Vitamins.  The basic recipe is as such:

A handful of Spinach, sprig of Parsley, banana, heaping teaspoon of peanut butter and water to fill.

Into the blender it goes and visions of goodness travel through your head.  AHH! nutrient rich snack.  There are many differnent variations of this interesting treat.  Here is one I made on nutrition data, my friend Keith likes to call it "Swamp Juice".  Basically you take whatever greens you have on hand, instead of making a salad, put it in a blender and you got a drink that will last you about two hours.

Intro to power based coaching

Let's get this started off right, here's one of my favorites types of workouts.  It's called Tmax Intervals.  For those unfamiliar with reading and interpenetrating power data, the picture represents different metrics recorded from my SRM power meter and I am using PowerAgent 7.5 to read the data in this case.  Yellow is Power, red is Heart Rate and green is Cadence.  I recommend this workout as a really great way to train the aerobic-anaerobic borderline.  What you see here is an hour long trainer segment from a workout I did back in Dec '12.

Workouts like this one are very difficult, not only to perform but also to know what power to target.  Maximal aerobic power (MAP) and lactate threshold tests are used to collect the data necessary to tailor this workout to your specific physiology.  The MAP test is included in my initial athletes setup and I also offer lactate testing at the Tucson Endurance Performance Center for an additional fee.

One may wonder why having a power meter is important?  If you want to push the boundaries of your human body, you can do it without computers that is true.  I just heard a great anecdote about power meters from David Glick "Why don't you just put a piece of masking tape on your bars and write "YOU SUCK" on it?"  What does that mean?  Well, power doesn't lie, everyone has their limits.  The "you suck" comment could be relevant in comparing your power to a top pro cyclist.  But that is not why they benefit amateurs like you or myself.

Sure it's fun to compare power, but the reason it's important is that it's YOUR power.  It can help you ride fast, burn fat, heat acclimate, push your limits, soul search, battle inner demons, etc... better than any tool I've ever used.  Sure, people have been riding bikes fast for a long time, I mean, the derailleur was invented back in 1900.  I could have done the above workout on heart rate alone, that is a lovely sine wave.  But if you look closely, heart rate is a little slow at responding to the effort.  In that workout, 20seconds into the interval my heart-rate has flattened out matching the flatness of the power output.  By working with power you have the ability to know your possible limits and improve your strengths and weaknesses.

That's enough rambling for today.