Through the Coach's Lens Pacing the Unpaceable

Not all watts are created equal. Sometimes you’re better off ignoring the numbers in real time to focus on other aspects of a race or training session, saving the data for a post-ride deep dive. Conversely, some scenarios benefit from live monitoring so you can adjust your effort on the fly.

Check out our latest blog post by 4iiii ambassador, former WorldTour pro, and coach Alex Dowsett, as he shares insights from his own career and the athletes he mentors on when and how to apply power data for the best results.

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I was lucky that I experienced racing without and then with a power meter. So I was less interested in telling everyone how much power I’d produced when I got back to the bus or village hall and only really interested in the result.

In a road race, the power meter really is useful in 3 scenarios.

Getting in a breakaway is not the time to look at your numbers

Here is what the first hour of a professional road race actually looks like on a power file. Flag drops. Someone attacks. You go with it. It doesn’t stick. Someone else attacks. You go with that too. Ten minutes in, you have already done four efforts that would count as a decent interval session, and the break still hasn’t gone. This carries on until it does, which might be five kilometres or might be sixty.

If you want a number for it, I have been over the threshold for [X] minutes in the first hour, in [X] separate efforts, with a normalized power that would look like a half decent time trial but an average power that says it may have been easy.

The riders who make the break are not the ones who looked down at their head unit and thought, that’s a bit much; I’ll sit in. They are the ones who didn’t look at all. They went on feel and instinct, on the shape of the race, on who was moving and whether the peloton was starting to let go. The power meter was recording all of it. My fondest memory of this was stage 6 of the Tour of Britain in 2014, after 50km of constant attacking Mathias Braendle came up to me and said, “Now I think it is a good time to go.” Now was what felt like my 50th attempt to attack, so what was one more! We escaped, and that was the breakaway for the day.

What the power meter is actually for in a road race

This is the bit I got wrong for a long time and have only really understood since I started coaching.

In a time trial, the power meter is a dashboard. You read it live, and you act on it. In a road race it is a diary. You do not read it in the moment. You read it afterwards, and it tells you what the race cost.

Those are two completely different jobs, and most riders, including me, only ever use it for the first one. Which means on a road race they either ride to a cap and miss the race, or they ignore it entirely and learn nothing.

The riders who ignore the numbers in the first hour and still win are not ignoring data. They have already done the reading. They know from a hundred previous files that they can do fifteen efforts over threshold in the first forty minutes and still have a sprint at the end, because they have done it before and looked at what it cost. The confidence to go on feel comes from having checked the feel against the numbers, repeatedly, on days when it didn’t matter.

What this means for how we train

This is where it gets awkward, because the way most amateur riders train is the way I used to race time trials. Steady. Controlled. Two by twenty at threshold, hold the number, don’t go over it. And that is fine for building an engine. It is not fine for the first hour of a road race, which is a different sport.

A rider who has spent the winter holding 280 watts for twenty minutes has trained one specific ability: holding 280 watts for twenty minutes. They have not trained the ability to do 450 for thirty seconds, drop back to 200, do 500 for twenty seconds, sit at 320 for four minutes, and then do it again. Which is what the first hour asks.

I have a rider I coach, anonymous because he’d be mortified, who has a threshold that would embarrass most of the people he races against. He was getting dropped in the first twenty minutes of races and could not understand it. When we looked at the files, it was obvious. His steady state numbers were excellent. His ability to repeat hard efforts from a high baseline was suffering, and we were able to single that out and train for it. Along with some race craft work to be more efficient, we got him up to speed!

So we changed a couple of things;

First, we stopped treating the first hour as something to survive and started treating it as a session. Most of his hard days now start with [X] minutes of race simulation: short unstructured surges, ten to thirty seconds well over threshold, at irregular intervals, from a tempo base rather than from rest. No target wattage. The instruction is to go when he feels like it and to make some of them hurt. Then a proper steady block afterwards, because the point is not the surges. The point is what he can still do after them.

Second, we moved his testing. An FTP test done fresh tells you what a rider can do fresh. Nobody races fresh. We now do his key testing after by measuring fatigue resistance and all-out effort in the first hour, then an all-out effort in the 4th hour and see what the drop-off is.

The short version

If you are riding to your power meter in the first hour of a road race, you are possibly losing the race in order to protect a number. The riders beating you have looked at more files than you, not fewer. They just did it at the kitchen table rather than on the bike.

Introduce some unstructured training into your structure. Test tired. Read the diary afterwards. And on the day, look up and trust your gut.

I use 4iiii power meters for all of this, which is relevant because the diary only works if the pages are accurate.

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Alex Dowsett is a former professional cyclist and current coach. He rode fourteen Grand Tour stages and set a world Hour Record in 2015. He now works with amateur and competitive club riders, helping them train smarter using data they already have.
Follow Alex Dowsett here: Alex Dowsett

4iiii produces power meters trusted by WorldTour professionals and club riders alike. Find out more at 4iiii.com