Saturday, June 5, 2010

Friday Night Pro1/2/3 track race Quadrant Analysis

Okay here we go. I did the Pro 1/2/3 omnium of 40 laps scratch race and 50 laps points race last night. The blue dots are the warm-ups and cool-downs. The red dots are the the 90 laps of racing at an average speed of 45 kph. Average cadence was 105 rpm. I ride a 94" (49x14) gear. I barely sniffed the front a couple times but with a full field of 36 hungry riders I was basically relegated to the role of wheelsucker. I never missed a split and was rarely in danger of getting dropped. I didn't bother with the miss n out as I was done done done with it by then. The big surprise is the high percentage of quadrant IV riding. That's almost half (46.6%) of the effort being high cadence (above 100rpm) and low watts (below threshold). So the take home for the night is it really does pay to do lots of high cadence work on little gears...I'll show more of that in the up and coming block of speed work, but it is strikingly obvious at this point in the game that the big watts will need to come with high cadence. Hitting 1200 watts at 90 rpm is of no use here...

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