Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Crash Data

People often ask me how fast I was going when I made a mess of myself.

One of the first things I did when I got moved back into my apartment last weekend, was plug my bike computer into my home PC and download the data from the day I crashed my bike. It turns out I was going 40 km/hr or around 25 mph when I hit the cement. At least I wasn't still doing the 55 km/hr I was doing down the hill prior to arriving at the corner. Here's a graph I put together from the last 40 seconds of the San Marcos Circuit Race (each data point represents about 1.26 seconds of time). Note that if you click on any of these images they'll open full size in another window:



These other two shots summarize the data from the ride. The first one shows the overall data detail. You can see how much my power (the yellow line) was consistently over 350 watts towards the end of the ride as I bridged up to the breakaway and powered my way down the hill. Back around July 15th, my anaerobic threshold power (the power level one can maintain for a 3 minute duration or so) was about 375 watts, so I was running pretty close to the redline as I powered up the hill to catch the break:



The summary view that's shown below gives some overall detail of the ride. It gives some info on where my power levels and heart rate were with regard to some pre-configured distribution ranges. What is often most telling about this summary page is the peak power values by time range. If you look at the top left of the image you can see that I was able to hold 483 watts for one minute during the ride. It's not the most I've held for a minute (closer to 600 is my best), but still pretty good when you consider that it came during a race and not during a 1 minute training interval like my max did.