Sydney Brown, one of the athletes that I coach, recently attended the Sunny King Criterium in Anniston, Alabama an NRC event and part of speedweek. Above is the power file of her race in the Pro 1/2 women’s field. These women were truly flying on this .7 mile 4 corner course. The race followed a counter-clockwise direction. The final straight is a slight uphill as can be see on every lap where attacks took place. This can be seen on lap 5 where Sydney reached her highest peak watts for the race of 922. Every lap on that hill ranged in the 600-800 watt output. Yes indeed, putting some real torque to her team Revolution Madone sponsored by Trek bicycles
Talking with Sydney gave me a real good clue as to why they wanted to attack this hill. The finish line was at the top with lots of preemes on the line. After this hill you can see a decrease in power as she recovered with a slight downhill into turn 1 and into turn 2 also. Then the gas was applied again as she powered out of turn 2. Between turns 2-3 was a downhill as can be seen by the decrease in power but an increase in speed. After turn 3 a power increase spike then turn 4 and power up the hill for that preeme. Look for those yellow spikes and you’ll see a distinct pattern of 4. One for each acceleration out of a corner.
Most of the time she raced top 1/3 and tried a few attacks and covered a few. From her description of how she raced and the graph I will be able to get her efforts between corners, for each lap and her attacks to apply these to her crit training. Since crits have a certain power file pattern such as this one, for the rest of the season we’ll be able to apply this data. What is really beneficial is when this race comes up next year. We’ve got a way to train for this in the spring.
I’ll be posting day 2 Nalley Historic Roswell Criterium power analysis soon!
Marc
Posted by admin as power file at 1:19 PM MST