Technology

I was betrayed by technology at training today.

First I had a power meter error (okay wasn't so much an error as unplugged) and then when I got it working it immediately ran out of battery. The flat battery seemed to freak our my cycling head unit which suddenly froze and required a reboot. All rather inconveniently while I was trying to cycle. How annoying, doesn't my technology understand that if I am not recording my training session then I am not getting fulfilled as a human being. I MUST be recorded, quantified and analysed.

I would love to say that this is one of those posts about how the lack of technology was ultimately liberating, how being unplugged from the devices allowed me to simply go out and enjoy my ride. It isn't one of those posts. Frankly I just found it annoying. I have been using a power meter for years now and without it I was actually a little lost. I had HR and obviously perceived effort to judge my effort by, but I am a little out of practise with those metrics and besides they tend to have a lag. Call me a data junkie (I really am) but I just like having my power data. Not being able to measure the ride against other sessions meant that I finished the ride feeling strangely unfulfilled. Probably a sad indictment on me I guess, but there you go.

The world of triathlon does seem to sit in two camps, those who see data as a useful tool and those who think it is an unnecessary complication. Probably don't need to point out which camp I am in. I fully acknowledge that sometimes it is nice to switch off the data and simply go riding/running/swimming, I completely agree with that. But for me, in general training, the specificity and training quality that comes with data measurement is well worth the hassle.

Yes for very experienced athletes they know their bodies well enough to work off "feel". They know what threshold feels like, what tempo is. There are numerous examples of experienced athletes being told to run at 4:00min/km and being able to dial it in exactly just from experience. That definitely happens and this isn't really about them. The people I am thinking of are the inexperienced athletes who have no idea what riding "hard" means. Athletes who do the easy bits too hard, and the hard bits too easy because they don't understand how hard they are supposed to be going. For those athletes data measures like pace, HR and power are ideal. With those athletes you can tell them exactly how hard to push in order to maximise the benefits of their training. This guidance makes sure that the efforts are done hard enough, but also that the recovery is effective too. Maximising the benefit of training in this way helps maximise the improvements too.

Without a doubt every tool has a place, however, in my view, training data is one tool that should be included in a lot of athlete's toolboxes.