wattage and pros

One thing I didn't make clear in my "it's tactics, stupid" post is my thought on pro cyclist's wattage outputs.

I'm definitely NOT a pro. When I first got a wattage trainer, I found myself in difficulty trying to sustain a 190 watt average for an hour. I wasn't really sure what that meant in the realm of things but during a group ride I mentioned the wattage stats (190w average) to a very enthusiastic Cat 4 (he had a PowerTap wheel) and got the kind of pitiful look you give a sorry racer. To top it off, I got dropped shortly thereafter.

Anyway, my threshold is pretty low.

Pros, on the other hand, can sustain some incredible averages. I've read a few quotes where pros sustain a 300 watt average for 6 hours (!). Hincapie was one, another was a lesser known pro who said that the "300w x 6 hr" ride was a record for him. So they can do something like that.

Now the Flandis wattage stats, if they can be believed, seem reasonable. They don't break 425 watts by too much. In fact, they seem to sit below 400.

To put that in perspective to what I do, one of the standard "out of the box" workouts described in the little pamphlet that came with the trainer is doing all out one minute efforts. I set a countdown timer to 60 seconds, start rolling (since I get massive tire slip when I jump from a standstill), hit the start button, and go. I start moderately aggressively, typically at 450 watts or so, start to blow, drop into the 300's, then do a final sprint which might consist of a sustained 450-475 watts. The end result? 402 watts. For a minute. Multiply that enormous effort by, say, 50, and you get a nice climb in the Tour. Oh, and I'd have to be something like 30 lbs lighter.

Pros are just a different kind of creature.

It reminds me of a poster I had when I was a kid. National Geographic, one of the solar system and its place in the galaxy. Anyway, there is a little thumbnail of Earth, with an arrow pointing to where it belongs in a little sketch of the solar system. There is another arrow pointing from the solar system to it's place in a small cluster of "local" stars. There is yet another arrow, placing the star cluster into a larger star cluster. There are even more arrows placing the various exponentially larger bodies of matter until there is an arrow pointing to a spot in the middle of a bunch of galaxies with the note "known universe". It's mind boggling, and I struggle to get past the local star cluster arrow.

Pros are like that to us Cat 3's. At least to me. After all, you get some really good Cat 3 and he will get eaten alive in a regional 1/2/3 race (unless he's destined to be a pro, in which case he'll actually win the thing or something). The regional winners, when they get dunked into big national races, say, Philly, or Tour of Georgia, well, they are not even good enough to be pack fodder. They might make an impression at something "minor" like Superweek. The winners of those domestic pro events, they go to the Classics or the small European stage races and they are nowhere. I mean no where. Minutes and minutes down on GC or crossing the finish line when the Classics winner is already interviewing on TV. Those winners? They're the ones who are not favored in the "big" races, the Tour, the Giro, hence they aim for the dinky pro races like the Dauphine or Paris Nice. Or they'd show up "for training". Sort of like Bugno and Fignon showing up at Tour Du Pont to do some training miles. And chasing down some poor unsuspecting amateurs like Chann McRae when he tried to go off the front.

Anyway, at the peak of the sport is the Tour. Guys who are used to annihilating the top pros get annihilated. Or reduced to that of "get me some bottles". When you watch world champions drop out or drop back to the team car for bottles, you know the guys they're helping are pretty strong.
Makes me think about those galaxy arrows.

And how far away that Tour galaxy is from the Cat 3 solar system.