The Picture That Changed My Life

This picture changed my life. To me it is a thing of pure beauty.

Actually to be accurate it was a picture like this not this one.

But it doesn't matter because the beauty lies not in the picture itself but what it represents.

Way back in 2007 I became interested in taking training more seriously and followed the blog of Flamme Rouge Tony. 

http://www.flammerouge.je/home/home.htm

He's a guy who lives in Jersey and he was way ahead of the trend in many ways. Just one was his love of sportives, at a time when most British cyclists had never heard the word and he was was on the reasons I started trying them for myself.

But the thing that was really special about him was that he was power mad. He was absolutely clear that power meters were the way ahead and his infectious enthusiasm came across in every one of his posts.

He was so convincing that I arranged to go and see him, in order to perform my first ever ramp test. He made me very welcome and also took me on a tour of the island with a couple of his mates. One of them owned a bike shop and before the trip we had agreed a price on a Powertap wheel, my first ever power meter.

After the island tour Tony opened up his lap top, connected his Garmin, did a bit of stuff then told me to take a look. This was another baptism, my introduction to WKO.

He took me through the ride we had just done, explaining the various graphs and I loved every minute of it. Seeing the long steady drags, the really tough hills and the peak when we had a sprint.

But then he showed me the picture like the one above. He explained that what it showed was something called "mean maximal power" (or MMP). This is a complicated name for a simple idea. It just captures on one line how much power you can produce and how long you can hold it for.

It's a plot of watts vs time so it starts high in the top left because you can produce a lot of power for a short time. But if you try to push for longer the power comes down. In fact it comes down very quickly. The time axis on the bottom is a logarithmic scale, so the left hand side is represents much less time than the right. (It has to be like this or it would not be possible to see any detail,)  For illustration, In the example above the line near halfway is just under 2 minutes while the extreme right is 20 hours.

As an example, at my best, if I go all out I can just about produce 800W. But for a minute the max is around 500W. For 5 minutes its around 400W, for 20 minutes 340W, for an hour 310W and for 4 hours 250W. So its very obvious how quickly power changes with time, In fact my power changes less than most others which is why I'm more comfortable doing longer events that do not involve and sprinting.

You can choose to report on any time period. So the line may just be for a single ride. Or a week, or a month.

But the magic came when Tony told me what he was showing me. He said the bottom line was this year's power. The upper line was his best ever power. He explained that he had a simple mission, every year he wanted to get the lower line to meet and ideally pass the upper line.

In plain English this meant that his goal was to set new personal bests, but seeing it as a picture like this felt so much more real than just a set of numbers.

My life changed at that instant. From then on, through to the present and for the rest of my days Tony's goal became my goal. I love going for rides, downloading my stats and seeing how close I have come to a new PB.

I reset the bottom line every birthday and the graph above is about one month in. It's obvious I still have a way to go. Still there is already good news, which the line highlights, I've already managed to a small nudge up.

One of the main reasons for starting this blog is to give me the motivation to keep pushing so I can post updates when another breakthrough happens.

Technology has moved on so now I can even see the picture when I am riding. On many occasions it has been the spur to make be push harder as it changes colour at that point which means more to me than any race finish position,

But watts are not all that there is to this picture.

The really great thing about it is the bottom time axis, because it ranges from 1s to as long as you can ride a bike. So the quest to move the entire line upwards means I have been encouraged to try pretty much every form or road bike riding from criteriums where I could try (and fail) to win a sprint finish to 1000 mile epics riding continuously for days with barely a pause to sleep.

I would never have done this or even a fraction without the drive to raise the line. I will forever be in Tony's debt for changing my life for the much much better.