Ryan Bickerstaff

I went out for my first bike ride outside with my new bike and powertap wheel on Saturday.  It’s a fairly challenging 66-67 mile route to the coast and back, with some pretty significant climbing, but the scenery is pretty varied and once you get to the top of the first climb, it seems a bit easier.  This is my fifth time doing this route, and I’m happy to say it was my fastest ever by 12 minutes.  Here are some times I dug up from the past:

April 12, 2008 - 4:50:00
June 14, 2008 - 4:23:00
August 30, 2008 - 4:00:00
March 28, 2009 - 4:06:40
April 18, 2009 - 3:47:53

Here’s the route and a representative picture along the coast.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of fog over the ocean up to about a quarter of mile inland, but otherwise it was sunny and warm.  It was pretty cool to see the fog sitting there when I was descending down the mountain.
 
          

I took splits at some key points - at the intersection of Page Mill and Skyline (almost to the top of Page Mill), at the general store in Pescadero (stop to get a cinnamon roll and chocolate chip cookie), after finishing the climbs on Stage Rd and Highway 1 at the turn onto Tunitas Creek, at the top of Tunitas Creek, and then down Kings Mountain to home. Here are some comparison times between March 28 and April 18:

Page Mill - 59:47, 53:43
Pescadero - 60:09, 54:32
Stage Rd - 37:27, 35:53
Tunitas Creek - 46:41, 42:51
Kings Mountain to home - 42:36, 40:52

Now for the good stuff. This was my first time using the Powertap outside, and I’ve included all the intervals below. This was pretty much a continuous ride, except for the break in Pescadero to get something to eat. I set the graphs to display rolling 30s averages. It records data every second, but it looks really choppy if you don’t do any smoothing to the data. If you include the zeros (coasting), my average watts was 235. If you remove everything below about 30 watts, it is close to 280 watts. I have no idea how this compares to other people, but it’ll be interesting to see how I progress with this.

The Entire Ride:

To the top of Page Mill:

To Pescadero:

Stage Rd and Highway 1:

Tunitas Creek:

Kings Mountain to Home:

The Powertap software also shows your peak power over various intervals from 1 second to 2 hours. I’ll have to do a workout focused specifically on seeing what my maximum values are at some point, but here were what they were during this ride (includes any time spent coasting with zero watts…which really only affects the 60 and 120 minute values):

1s - 973 watts (3 hours 30 minutes into the ride!!!)
5s - 812 watts
30s - 492 watts
1m - 414 watts
5m - 341 watts
10m - 330 watts
30m - 308 watts
60m - 277 watts
120m - 256 watts

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