After yesterday’s events, today felt like a normal day again.  I got up, worked all day and then did my workouts for the day – another ‘inverse brick’, where I ran and then rode my bike.

My ride was mostly an easy Zone 1/2 effort, with a few thirty second hard efforts thrown in, to break things up.  As I was riding, I kept my eye on my bike computer to monitor my power.  This has now become totally routine for me, but I realized that riding by power, might not be what everyone does.

On my rides (and races for that matter), I use power to govern my effort.  I also use time to dictate the length of the session.  I think a lot of people however, focus on speed and distance during their rides.  It always sounds so impressive to say, “I rode 90 miles today” versus “I rode for 5 hours”.  Equally, average speed, somehow means more than it should.

Distance and speed during workouts don’t mean much, because they totally depend on things like terrain, weather and when riding roads, how often you need to stop for things like traffic lights.   It’s much more important to understand the effort you put in, and if you like data, then power is much more representative of effort, than speed.

As shown in the photo, I don’t even track speed on my bike computer.  I track current power (5 second average), overall average power, overall normalized power and total time.  I do this because I do the same thing in a race.  In races I have a target normalized power, and try to minimize the difference normalized power and average power.  I’ll get into why I do this, in another blog.

Tonight’s ride was fantastic.  I was great to feel the bike accelerate during those hard efforts and I managed my highest one minute power for the year, so far.  Super happy to be just moving forward, even though I have no races in sight.