Something discovered in Strava

I confess to being a Strava novice but I hope this short article of help. I am near the beginning of a long, and concerted programme of cycle training. I am training 5 days a week, most weeks, and plan to participate in an average of one endurance event a month throughout 2018.

The motivation for this level of engagement is to support Bloodwise in their work to beat blood cancers and support patients with this evil disease. I hope to ride 5000 miles in 2018 to raise £5000 for Bloodwise

My coach at Cadence Performance (Crystal Palace) provides me with a daily session plan which on Friday this week looked like the picture in diagram 1 below.

Diagram 1 (the text continues with a description of the complete workout but is not shown)

The text of the programme of 'work' continued to describe 10 second, high cadence, sprints at 460 watts and then the power I should aim to achieve for each of the over-under intervals. 

My FTP is low (230watts), I am sixty-four years old and have only just recovered from an accident a little over a year ago. 

In the session on Friday, after the warm-up and high cadence bursts, I was aiming at 1 minute at 253watts followed by 1 minute at 173 watts repeated 10 times. Then after a 2-minute zone 1 recovery to go again with another 10 sets of 253/173 watts intervals.

So far so good. I was 'up and at it' according to Strava at 06:52am and worked on the turbo trainer for 1hr and 33 seconds (the extra seconds are to make sure my Garmin does not record less than one hour). Data from my workout is sent to Garmin Connect, Strava, Training Peaks and MapMyRide. (Ok, I am gadget man according to my daughters-in-law and a bit of a geek).

The best 'pictures' of workouts come from Garmin Connect (see diagram 2) but getting information from these charts about the average power delivered in each interval is something I have not yet managed to achieve.

Diagram 2

I was pleased with how well the pattern of my effort reproduced what had been set. But how close was I to the average power I had been aiming at? The power meter (and cadence) figures from my turbo trainer 'bounce' around even when I think I am pedalling evenly. The Garmin results will give me averages for predefined intervals – 1 minute or 5 minutes is fine but not 2 minutes. So while I could get averages for intervals for Friday I could not do the same for Monday where I had 3-minute intervals. See diagram 3

Diagram 3 (the text continues with a description of the complete workout but is not shown)

Enter Strava as the rescuer and provider of helpful data! The last 'ramp up' set for Monday was 5 mins at 219watts, 3 mins at 253 followed by 2 mins at 127 watts repeated twice.

The way Training Peaks delivers the session information means that my Garmin sees each segment as a lap and exports it as such to Strava after my work out.

'Confession time' – I had not thought about that import /export formatting until this week and had certainly not thought about the implications for finding out averages per lap (segment).

What I discovered this week was the 'lap bar' at the top of the workout overview charts section. See diagram 4 below.

A simple click on the lap sections of that bar produces the averages for the lap concerned. (In diagram 4, the black section is lap 25 which was 3 minutes.) I was aiming at an average power of 253 watts. By Clicking on the lap section I was able to see that I achieved an average of 274 watts. For me, that was a good result both in terms of my training and discovering average lap (segment) information from Strava.

Diagram 4
This is something I should have know but didn't.

Please support me in raising money to help beat blood cancers. You can give by visiting https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/stephenmaxted2018 or you can give by text send - SMAX53 and your amount of £1, £2, £3, £4, £5 or £10 to 70070. Sponsor my first event of 2018. Riding in Resolutions Sportive 27th January. Help raise £300 by the end of Jan.

Thank you.