12 hour power

 Still pretty impressed with myself for ending up not only doing one 12 but several and setting a new club record in the process....


Following on from previous post I have been thinking about what sort of power I will pace at.


I did a tryout on our 10TT course a few nights ago. Conditions were not very helpful with a strong headwind out and tailwind back. Ended up averaging 36kph for 234W/246NW.

Also tried using calculator here: http://bikecalculator.com/wattsMetric.html which reckoned that 34kph should take 195W on the drops and 240W on the hoods. (Aerobar would be 160W but I will not be using one for first attempt for reasons I will go into shortly).

Based on above 2 bits of info I reckon I will need to average somewhere in the region of 220W or so. This is 10w short of my "endurance" zone so is in the right sort of place. Also taking a look at my normal power curve:



My longest ride was my chase of 5000m climbing last year in France. Here I averaged 216NW for 9:30. This is short of target but that is not really a typical day as it was more of a hard tour than a race. This year on the Highclere I averaged 240NW for 7 hours and for the Marmotte 235 NW for 7:30. Extrapolating these as above gives me a guesstimated 12 hour power of between 230 and 215W. So pretty much dead on what I will need to achieve to do the 12 hours at above 20mph.

I will do a few more trials and see what results....