One of my most regular habits as a rider is the Cycling Weekly Club 10-mile time trial on Zwift of a Wednesday evening. It’s simple, it’s quick, it’s sort of fun, and it’s easy to do at the end of a working day.
However, I’ve noticed something disturbing. My average power never varies.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
It’s a very controlled event – the weather doesn’t change, the time of day is the same, there’s no traffic to hold you up, no junctions. Allowing for one or two different bike and power meter set-ups, and for some minor variations in the course, so far this year the worst it’s been was 375 watts and the best 382 watts. I even tried hiding the power readout. It made no difference. These numbers are within the normal day-to-day variations you’d expect. It’s essentially a flat line.
Meanwhile, it’s been the most random year of riding and training since I started cycling, and in that I include a season where I broke my hip. There were eight weeks in early spring that were exemplary – consistent, structured, with a 95% rate of session completion, accompanied by good sleep and sound nutrition. It also included July and August when I sat at my desk all day and all night for eight weeks eating Smarties and writing a book.
I analysed the relationship between training, form, and performance. The correlation coefficient is zero.
I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that I’m living the dream. I have a healthy threshold power, and I don’t have to do anything to maintain it.
I’m afraid I can’t agree. For one thing, since I took up cycling I’ve spent nearly a year and a half’s worth of my time actively training. How much difference did it make? ‘Some’ I might be prepared to accept. But ‘none’? Even thinking about it makes me teeter on the edge of a psychological precipice.
For another thing, just think what it does to my motivation. I should be training, because irrespective of the aerobic training benefits there are sound health-based reasons for wanting to do it, and it’s not like I get a free pass to all of those too. But now the main reason to do seven hours a week is to fend off type-2 diabetes in 30 years’ time, and that isn’t nearly as valuable an inspiration as the prospect of beating a random dude from Canada in a Zwift time trial next week.
It’s an expensive problem too. If I can’t improve by training harder, the only way to go faster is to go shopping, and the numbers don’t stack up. If an extra hour’s targeted training a week would put 30 watts on my threshold, that’s only 50-odd hours a year – call it six days’ worth of working hours. Buying those 30 watts in the form of bikes, wheels, skinsuits and helmets, given I’ve already got a very good set-up, is going to cost perhaps £4,000. Training is cheap, but only if it works.
More than any of that, though, so much of why I ride has to do with some sort of self-improvement. The idea of training underpins a lot of what we all do. I don’t go on a four-hour ride with my friend Bernard because I enjoy his company. I go because I think it makes me a better rider. I like the fresh air, the countryside, the accomplishment of putting miles behind me. But I want some higher purpose.
The only comfort I can take from it is looking back on the confidence with which I’ve assured people that they should try one of my interval sessions. “It’s great – it really works for me!” I’ve told them, fuelled by nothing except confirmation bias. At least I’ve been wasting their time too. That makes me feel a lot better.
This article was originally published in Cycling Weekly magazine. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
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