Because I was helping I had to stand around for 30 minutes before my start – as a result I didn’t get a warm-up in at all. That’s not ideal, but it meant I could both help out and ride, so I would be happy to do it again, I would just want to get there and changed and ready a bit sooner! I didn’t really ride to power, I just tried to measure my effort and work hard. It’s actually quite hard to see the power on my headunit when on the aero bars – it’s a lot easier to see the speed, so when I looked down that was often what I adjusted my effort on. While pretty flat, the road surface and elevation were a bit more varied than riding on the circuit, so it’s less evenly paced than the last one.

Onto the actual ride itself – I felt it went OK. There were parts where I was going downhill where I felt I wasn’t producing enough power (just turning my legs over), and there were a couple of bits where I was going uphill where I felt like I was going too slow. Looking at the chart, I think that’s a reasonable evaluation, though the cadence seems quite steady. I think that if I get into a rhythm with my breathing and my cadence it is harder to choose to go a little bit faster.

The numbers look reasonable for me – same average Watts as last time out but slightly higher normalised power. However, this is almost a minute slower – it can’t be blamed on the elevation gain as that’s only 16m more! The bike setup hasn’t changed, so the only significant difference is probably the corners – you can see from the plot that there are 4 times where my power drops to 0 and those are the corners – I used a little brake on corners 1, 2, and 3 and quite a lot on the turnaround roundabout – you can see that by how low the speed goes. I also had a car baulk me at the roundabout which didn’t help, but probably didn’t cost me more than a couple of seconds.

There are 2 takeaways for me from this ride. I don’t think I had a problem with producing power at high cadences this time around (there wasn’t much time at higher cadences), the main problem with the power was failing to kick the cadence (and speed) up fast enough after slowing for turns. That won’t be a problem for the next 2 weeks on the airfield circuit, but is going to limit me on the other road circuits on the club calendar. This is a natural limitation for a fixed, but it’s not a big deal when there are only a few turns, and there are minutes to be gained by focusing elsewhere.

The other thing I need to look at is my aerodynamics. Looking at the strava segment here https://www.strava.com/segments/1473339?filter=overall , of the 30 people slower than me, only 2 made more power, and most made much less. Conversely, while the top 20 is mostly >300W, there are quite a few people who are minutes faster than me despite making less power. Clearly that’s influenced by body size and weight (I’m 6ft and 77kg with reasonably broad shoulders), but on such a flat course, weight isn’t a big deal – power and drag are the key components.

I’m not changing the bike (at least not this year), and I don’t think it’s that which is causing all the excess drag – I think it is my position (and maybe my helmet). I need to spend some time riding this bike practising turtling my neck and shrugging my shoulders, but ideally I should find some time to do some rudimentary aero testing. I’m considering trying a position where I raise my hands up much closer to my face – it seems to work for a lot of riders, and hopefully it will also help me shrug a bit better. It looks like it might be dry on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so I may pick a quiet bit of straight road and ride up and down it with various different configurations and see if I can spot any improvements. There’s a huge amount of literature out there about DIY aero testing, so I’m looking forward to having a go! Hopefully I can also combine it with doing some repeated efforts and get some training benefit out of it too.