Aerobic Endurance Workout

Above is a WKO screen dump of a four hour ride. Well, you can't quite see all four hours, you would have to scroll down further to see the last hour and a half of data. The curves show everything captured by the awesome SRM PCVI unit and include traces for power, cadence, speed, altitude and temperature. In this WKO view there's simply too much data to see and it requires some distillation. When reviewing my post ride data I always remind myself of the purpose of the the workout. In this case it was to complete four hours of consistent effort in levels 2 and 3 (endurance and tempo), and to pedal between 90 and 100rpm. For me, that's a long ride and if I didn't pace myself well I wouldn't maintain even level 2 for the duration. However, the graphs as seen above are not very revealing.



In this version, using WKO, I have hidden all the traces except for power, I've also applied "10 second" smoothing in order to hide the variable nature of power. Again, however, looking at four hours worth of data in this way does not show me whether I rode as planned.



In this version, I've switched from the "stacked" to "single line" graph view and now I can really see what the power curve looked like for the full four hours and that it was a pretty consistent effort. I also applied 1 minute smoothing as well.



In this final version I've clicked on the WKO power axis and added two horizontal grid lines to mark the bottom of level 2 and the top of level 3. I've also reduced the smoothing slightly. I was pretty happy with this picture of the data as it clearly showed that I'd stuck to my goal and had completed a good solid aerobic endurance workout. There were no sustained periods of time spent messing around at recovery pace, and equally there was no efforts at too high an intensity that would have provoked different adaptations. Hills and road junctions inevitably mean that power is more variable, but what matters is the total time spent in target zone and the overall emphasis of intensity.