Calibrate Your Effort!
The author finishing one of the longest climbs in the world. Rental bike, no power meter.
I was approached by a rider I coach last week at a local race. He had a planned warmup with power guidelines loaded onto his phone on Garmin Connect, but it hadn’t synced to his cycling computer. We were in a spot with minimal cell service, which was likely the cause, and very difficult to get the devices to sync. As we started to talk about other, more low-tech ways to warm up, his device synced and he could use the power guidelines for warmup, eventually coming in second in the race after having to avoid a bystander in the finish chute!
Calibrating your effort is a key skill I teach athletes. We don’t always have the high tech feedback or guidance, and sometimes it's too hard to even look down at a screen when the effort goes ballistic. There are three basic metrics I use with coached athletes. Let's go over them.
9-11,000 feet of elevation at MTB Nationals in Winter Park, CO. You better use all the metrics you have to measure these efforts.
Power
We will start with the most accurate metric and move down from there. A properly calibrated power meter is an immense advantage both in training and racing, but it is important to have it calibrated (this is much easier than it used to be and just a cycling computer function for the most part) and to have reasonable training zones set by various methods and tests, some more complicated than others.
While power meters used to be reserved for serious racers and cost upwards of 3,000 dollars, the prices are much lower now, and they come as standard equipment on many high end road bikes. Pairing a power meter with a heart rate monitor is always a great idea, giving both external and internal pacing feedback.It’s key to do harder efforts with the meter and understand what power you can do at what duration. A great example is the Fairfax-Bolinas Road climb up to Ridgecrest in Marin County. A beautiful, steady grade in the redwoods with the famous turn everyone takes pictures of.
Knowing what wattage you can sustain all the way up is a huge boost, and can save literally minutes by not going out too hard, pacing well, and not “blowing up”.
Heart Rate
With the advances in power meter technology and lowering of cost, it's been easy to ignore heart rate monitors, but they are one of the most inexpensive ways to get a ton of feedback about what your body’s response is at a given intensity or environmental change, like high temperatures on a climb in August.
Establishing heart rate zones is fairly simple. Just ride a difficult climb for 20-30 minutes, take the average, and you will have a close approximation of your threshold heart rate. This data can then be plugged into lots of training platforms, or you can just write down the most important zones for long centuries, which are zone two or endurance, and zone four or threshold. Finding your true endurance zone is often easiest by listening to when your breathing gets deeper, or what is termed Ventilatory Threshold 1(VT1). This is a great introduction to our third metric for calibrating effort, RPE.
Perceived Exertion
Perceived Exertion, or Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE), is a simple scale from 1-10, with 10 being the hardest effort. This is the simplest and yet easiest to not get right, either over or more likely under-estimating what intensity is happening. When someone “blows up” on a climb a few minutes in, they most often underestimate what RPE they were at relative to the duration of the effort.
While RPE is the trickiest to get right, it's a fantastic tool to build awareness, help make decisions in races, and of course it requires zero technology.
For longer climbs, an intensity of 6 or 7 is just about right. For long endurance, you should shoot for 3-5 RPE. The VT1 referenced above is another great cue. If you can talk without laboring to breathe, you are probably right in the endurance zone.
While this sounds simple, it takes time and practice.
Putting It All Together
The best solution, of course, is to use all three of these metrics together. This is what most successful cyclists do, constantly calibrating and evaluating their effort, while adding in information from the powerful little computers on our handlebars.
Never forget though, we have already incredibly powerful computers on our shoulders. It's just a matter of learning how to analyze and manage all that information.
If you have questions, I’m happy to help!