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.