I woke up this morning to see the first snow of the season lying on the ground.  I thought to myself ….  “I’m glad I made the decision to ride my bike on the trainer today”.

So as I finished work and was getting changed into my bike gear, I started to think about what kind of bike ride to do.  My coach has given me a “choice week”, which is essentially another week of recovery from my run, where I get to chose what I do.  As I thought about my ride, something that has bothered me all summer came into my mind.

As part of using power to track my fitness on my bike, I have been looking at my power curve.  This is a graph that shows the maximum power I have been able to bike at for various time intervals.  The software I use has, 1 second power, 5 second power, 10 second power, 30 second power, 1 minute power etc., all the way up to 3 hour power. 

Well all summer, I have looked at graph comparing my 2020 power curve to my 2019 power curve.  At every interval, my 2020 number was slightly higher than my 2019 numbers, which shows I am getting stronger on the bike.  This was true except for one number, my one minute power.  For some reason, I hadn’t done any workouts in 2020, where I went all out for a minute.  As a result my 2019 one minute power was 10% higher than my best 2020 number.  Seeing that dip in the curve has bothered me for months and so today I decided to try and change that … I needed to scratch that itch.

In hindsight it wasn’t that smart of a thing to do.  Mentally, going into the ride, I kept telling myself to “get over it” and just do an easy ride.  Instead, I did ‘go for it’ and I wasn’t able to really give it my best shot.  I didn’t have the mental fortitude to dig deep for the last ten seconds.  It was somewhat ironic therefore, that I fell just one single watt short of beating my 2019 number.

In the end, I really didn’t do any harm by trying.  Sometimes you have to try something to get it out of your system.  The key is to move on afterwards and let it go.  As I write this, I am in a good place.  The shape of my power curve looks better now … I managed to scratch my itch.