Tell him/her this...

Watts are a measure of muscular strain (that which is propelling you forward) and HR is a measure of cardiovascular strain... which is, as you have cited, affected by many many elements.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

Watts are the measurement of your power output, it doesn't take cadence into account. You can ride 300W with 80rpms or at a cadence of 110. The amount and type of muscle fiber recruitment depends on the work load per pedal stroke. So I would go one step further and say that the power output per pedal stroke in combination with the total power output would more accurately describe muscular strain.

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�The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.� -Michelangelo

MoodBoost Drink : Mood Support + Energy.

I vote for WATTS.

What you are really trying to figure out is, "which number should I race to." Or, what number should I hold for each period of race so as to understand where my limit should be. So, one thing to look at is which measure is more consistent. Well, power is power (WATTS are WATTS). HR isn't consistent. It can be effected by fatigue, diet, hydration, mood, caffeine, etc.

So, if you are looking to use something for a race, it should be watts. At the IM distance it is most meaningful. If you have a target watt number to stick to, you'll always have people blow by you the first half of the ride. If you stick to your plan, you'll always start picking up lots of those folks around mile 80 or so. Again, HR is too inconsistent, as what you can hold at different times of the day fluctuates with conditions.

That's exactly what I said, but what I need to know is "why"? There has to be some concrete reason other than HR is variable. I'm with you though, I ride with watts.

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I proudly DO NOT post my workouts on Facebook!!!

i vote for neither, they are both inadequate, stand alone measurements for race day.
the only measurement tool you can rely on is PE, percieved exertion.
all others are adjuncts to help you learn how to understand and maximize your abilities.
only your percieved exertion at that point in time, based on the myriad of data points that your mind is able to correlate, is reliable.

(at least until the last half of the marathon, then have to turn it off and go on auto pilot)

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"Competetive sport begins where healthy sport ends"

You're right in that real-time power info is far more valuable in a race. Still, his CT work will make him more fit (if he learns how to use it to build a program). That alone will make him faster.

I still use HR in long course racing. After the first hour of riding, it settles down and is part of the troika of pacing feedback: PE, HR and watts. At the Caliman IM, I decided about an hour into the ride that I needed to drop my power target by about 8 watts, based on what PE and HR were telling me about riding at initial goal wattage. It just felt too hard, so I backed down and just stayed on that lower wattage figure the rest of the way.

In shorter racing, I ignore PE and HR completely and sit on a wattage number. If I'm in shape to hold 250 watts in a sprint race, I'm going to hold 250 watts, no matter how hard it feels!

Mark Allen did that, what...5-6 times at Kona? PE led him to one crash after another. It feels soooooo easy to ride away from everyone in the middle of the bike ride. 5:30 miles feel sooooooo easy early in the marathon.

The logic in several of your friend's conclusions are flawed, particularly

My buddy said, no, HR is better because although it may vary due to external factors, it's a built in governor such that it won't let you go harder than yo're able to. With watts, he said, you can try to ride to a number or a zone and blow up.

By definition, no one goes harder than they are able. One can ride to any number and blow up, pacing well does not require either a heart rate monitor or a power meter. Good pacing is good pacing. Now a PM will help one pace better as it is an immediate response to what the body is doing, by definition it is work. HR is a response to that work and therefore lags behind, sometimes a good bit. Power files from IM Wisconsin illustrate this point quite clearly as athletes often go too hard up some of the short hills. Wattage jumps up quickly, burning a match as the phrase goes. Heart rate take a bit to catch up with the real working being performed by the body but by the time HR does catch up, a good bit of damage has been done already. Watts is where it is at!

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Jason
Dig It Triathlon and Multisport
http://www.digittri.com

You'd be alone in making that claim. Muscles don't work the way you described.

I think I have posted 3 times in the last two months and each one you have replied to. :) :) :) :)

As for your post.... YES!!! And after the ride you can analyze that by looking at the torque graph. Funny how it has an inverse relationship with cadence (given constant watts(.

BTW... coming out for Ralph's... hope to see you there.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

I think your analogy to the marathon is right on target. PE is too unreliable in long distance racing as the appropriate pace early on usually feels too easy.

By best half-IM race came after a few months of training with power and heart rate and seeing how they interacted. I actually used the heart rate for pace and the watts to make sure I was not pushing 450 watts up the hills. My ride was good and I ran very well off the bike. However, of the two, I think the heart rate was more useful as a pacing tool.

Watts as a pacing tool, IMO, is not very useful by itself. It is an absolute number and doesn’t tell you anything about what you body is doing. My most recent race, a half-IM dnf came after racing with watts as my pacing tool. My goal pace/watts was off, something perhaps a heart rate monitor would have told me. I rode the bike too hard and was toast late in the bike; by mile 3 of the run I was walking.

I have also had at least one race where I was feeling spectacular that I sandbagged the bike, thinking I couldn’t possibly maintain that kind of wattage. At about 40 of 53 K I decided to abandon watts and just hammer. My last 30 minutes of riding set a 30-minute PR wattage and that was after an 8K run and 40 hilly k’s of cycling. Then I ran a ridiculous second run where only about 5 of the pro’s at PM N.C. outran me. I’ve abandoned the PM now, mostly because I was tired of being a slave to the watts all the time. My riding is much more enjoyable now. I will race of PE in short-course and go back to heart rate in half-IM distance.

I’m not sure your friend articulated his side of the argument very well, but I agree with his position. Heart rate does lag, but if you know that when you ride hills or wind then you simply adjust your pace accordingly. One of my more important personal lessons from riding with a PM was that riding out of the saddle on a tri bike is not really a very good idea. Most of the “match burning” takes place when a rider abandons his aerodynamic, high rpm efficient position and hammers out of the saddle. I saw it happen time and again in races as people passed me early on in hills and then fell back at the crest while I rolled by them, still spinning away at 80 or 90 rpm.

Chad

I think the best advice to give him is to tell him to give you his Computrainer. Why train with power indoors only to fall back to something else outdoors? Why not just buy a $100 trainer off ebay and ride indoors with HR?

Having race for 20 years and one of the "old schoolers" I have to go with HR. If you are trying to ride strictly to a wattage you can blow up. HR will be able to tell you where you are THAT DAY. If you go anarobic at 2500 meters you will NOT recover for a long time. It will broom wagon time.

Only if you choose too high a target. One still must choose wisely, just as one needs to choose a HR target.

<< I think your analogy to the marathon is right on target. PE is too unreliable in long distance racing as the appropriate pace early on usually feels too easy.

actually what you are saying is that your ability to monitor PE isn't good (no disrespect intended). If you do the workouts and know that you should be able to average 7 minute miles for a marathon for example, then you also know that the first 10km at 7mpm pace is going to feel relatively easy. In this example all you need is a stopwatch and you should be able to monitor PE pretty accurately. On the bike it becomes a bit more complex with wind etc. Personally if I was going to have one or the other I would prefer to use a heart rate monitor because it does take external enviromental factors into consideration while a power meter alone is just a measure of your power output. If something is off such as dehydration, onset of hyponutremia and so on, wattage will be affected but you may have no idea why your numbers are off. With a heart rate monitor if you know what you are looking for and how to decipher the numbers, you can read a lot more into it then with a power meter. If I were to use a power meter, I would always use it in conjunction with a heart rate monitor so that I would know when to make adjustments to my power numbers in a race based on the heart rate feedback.

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Mike Plumb, TriPower MultiSports
Professional Running, Cycling and Multisport Coaching, F.I.S.T. Certified
http://www.tripower.org

Ashburn, you are correct but, your AT stays pretty constant but the amount of effort to get there changes depending on if you have recovered from training, yesterdays ride, the EPO injection you had..... That is why HR would be best as I see it. If I am going easy and hit 185 then I know something is up. But if I can hammer, still hit 185 but I am flying, well you get the picture.

Are you saying that you recruit the same percentage of type I and type II fibers when riding 300W with 100rpms vs. 80? I would disagree.

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�The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.� -Michelangelo

MoodBoost Drink : Mood Support + Energy.

Yes, you stated what I couldn't. I was not saying that you should simply look at watts and nothing else. I was trying to explain to him that it's an important part of the "troika" as you say. If I know I can push 200 watts at 150 bpm, then I know that if 200 watts is requiring 165 bpm something's up. My point to him was that power zones are the same concept of hr zones, just using a different proxy, and the two will be correlated as in the example above. So, as you say, you need to be plugged into both sets of data. My larger point to him was that if he's training on the CT with watts, without a PM on his bike, it's only useful to demonstrate improvement, but on race day he'll be going by HR only. As many posters have stated, that's not the worst thing in the world.

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I proudly DO NOT post my workouts on Facebook!!!

Use a power meter to "calibrate" RPE. IOW, Race your plan on the course holding X on the long climbs, Y on the short climbs, Z on the flats as long as it feels how it has felt rehearsing this pacing strategy time and time again in your training (thus you are confident in your ability to run well afterwards). If the planned strategy feels harder at some point on race day, ease up until it feels right and begin asking the nutrition, hydration, weather questions, etc... If it feels easier, DO NOT GO HARDER...why? Because you can't do more than you can do! A fast friend of mine said she thought power meters should be banned...they're like cheating (of course, she uses one). You ride what you can ride "using your power" where it minimizes time best under the course conditions and take what the day "gives" you. So there... it's settled :-)

You can disagree all you want. But if you instead took a muscle biopsy, you'd see that I am correct.

I'm not claiming that a cyclist would be indifferent to those two cadences, but not for the reason you suggest. There is a "work-rest" cycle required of animal muscles, and there is evidence that different creatures have different optimal cycles. But this is thought to be linked to the cycling of lactate (or other metabolic products), and is not related to fiber type.

I agree with all that. Well, except for the EPO part... ;-)

For pacing the bike, I like a combination of objective work rate data and HR; for the run, I like a combination of pace and HR data.

The best runners in the world use pacing data, not simply PE and certainly not HR. The fastest bike track performances use rigorous pacing feedback in the form of time or power (which are equivalent on an indoor track). I don't think anybody ever set the hour record using PE or HR. They used power data, in the form of constant lap-time feedback.

Something's up, yes. But sometimes that something can be ignored; sometimes not. In a short-course race, I'm inclined to ignore HR feedback because it's always too high. In long-course, I am far more inclined to listen to HR after the first hour. In long course, I ignore PE if it says "too easy" -- I pay attention if it says "too hard."

as long as it feels how it has felt rehearsing this pacing strategy time and time again in your training

I don't know what others do, but I almost never go race pace in training and even when I do it doesn't feel the same in a race because in a race I am rested. This may work at IM race pace (I don't know; never tried IM) because you have to stay aerobic anyway, but the only time I approach race pace/effort in training is perhaps when I climb mountains at a steady pace that might be equivilent to half-IM pace.

Because you can't do more than you can do!

In 9 cases out of 10 that is probably correct, because we race on hope too often, not reality, but what happens on that one day where everything comes together and you are just flying. I wasted a spectacular day once because I kept to the numbers and didn't give enough credit to percieved exhertion. I've decided to go back to percieved exhertion and for longer races, heart rate so that never happens again. PMs are another tool; if your friend thinks hers is so great it's like cheating then she is giving it way too much credit.

Chad