After joining the TrainingPeaks webinar yesterday, I went out all motivated to get some data! I took a look at the plan for the day… Ah, leg speed drills. Wouldn’t be seeing a lot of wattage today. Still, I would have the goal to see what maximum cadence I could generate. So, I put the rubber to the road.

Here is the plan:

Warm up at 140-200 watts over 10 minutes. Then do: 3 sets of 5 jumps — 10-12 revs of cranks out of saddle. Do these with hands in drops like a ‘real’ sprint. Goal is to ACCELERATE CRANKARMS QUICKLY and to a final cadence of 135 rpm’s or more. 1 minute between jumps, 5 minutes between sets. Max power not a goal here; leg speed is goal!

THEN do 4 X 10 second all-out sprints choosing a target line for each one. Focus on selecting the correct gear where you are not spun out at the target line yet spinning a high cadence. 5 minutes between each of these. Cool down for balance of duration.

As I warmed up, I headed toward a long stretch of road I knew to be nice and smooth with little traffic. I figured I could get the work done by going back and forth on this road and then head home. I didn’t want to get too far out there.

The first part of the test was simple enough. On the trainer, I had been able to do these jumps and hit a max cadence over 200 rpm. As I attempted them on the road, I was not able to see the computer face during the jumps and was guessing I was hitting 140 rpms. Of course, the WKO+ report would give me the low down.

The second part of the workout was a little harder to do. It wasn’t really that it was hard physically, but it was hard to properly execute. It entailed 1) finding the proper gear, 2) pedaling for at least 10 seconds, and 3) sprinting toward a line.

I played around with 1 during the five attempts I made. 2 and 3 I just hoped I was getting it right. However, right away I knew I was messing up. The goal of the day was leg speed – not power. Being afraid that I would spin out in the sprint, I moved to the big ring. Unfortunately, this caused me to see only numbers like 115 to 130 rpms when I looked down.

WKO+ leg speed workout graph (click to enlarge)

Well, I would just wait to see the report from my coach. Here is what he said:

Jumps are excellent with max cadences of 140+-170+ rpm’s.  One is even in the 180′s; so high that I took a closer look at the ‘raw data’ file to be sure meter is reading right.  I think it is!  Mission accomplished on the jumps indeed.

That made me happy.  Looking at the numbers I see my lowest was 155 rpm and my highest was 188 rpm. The higher rpms came toward the end of the workout as I started getting comfortable doing the efforts on the road rather than the trainer.

My power efforts during this time weren’t that bad. All of them were over 1000 watts (and I wasn’t supposed to be trying for wattage). All in all, I am happy with that portion of the workout.

Now for the second part that I was more nervous about…

Sprints – #3 of the five sprints is most like what I was looking for here; that is, ‘…not spun out and spinning a high cadence’.  The other four are a lower cadence than you’re capable of.  That said, you will improve at this as you’ve never trained nuero-muscularly before.

Hindsight is key here; knowing what gear to pick.  And even the big sprinters get this wrong at times.  Let today be a learning process.  I’d like to see you sprinting at +-1300 watts and a max cadence of 150 rpm’.  Zoom in on each sprint and see max cadence as a comparison to this thought.  Mind you, your wattages are all over 1000 in these sprints where the focus is NOT on power.  Very encouraging nonetheless.  All make sense?

Yeah, that is what I figured. So, I went to compare the five attempts in WKO+. The below chart is a Mult-File/Range Analysis. At the bottom of the chart there is a listing of the various ranges where you can compare the details of each attempt.

Multi-File/Range Analysis

I see I got my max power on the first one at 1300 watts. Obviously, I was going with too big of a gear at that point. My max cadence came on the third one with an rpm of 145. Looks like this was the only successful attempt out of five! Interesting that though it was my lowest wattage output at 1099 it was my second highest max speed.

Two final graphs to look at from TrainingPeaks WKO+ 3.0. Here you can see the above attempts compared to each other according to power and cadence. You can see a dotted line going through each. That is the target for all the attempts.

Cadence Comparison

The colors of the lines correspond to the color boxes to the left of each attempt as shown in the MFRA chart above. The below chart shows the same comparison according to power output. The dotted line shows the average the five sprints.

Power Comparison

I did this little exercise to give you an idea of how my coach and I use the WKO+ software when reviewing my workouts. We are able to do this from anywhere. He is able to use the WKO+ as a teaching tool — kind of like a visual aid — to help me understand what he is telling me.

I now have something to aim for in my future attempts. I want to replicate that third sprint as much as possible. One thing this tells me is that I need to take better mental notes about things such as gearing and technique.