• The Cycling News forum is looking to add some volunteer moderators with Red Rick's recent retirement. If you're interested in helping keep our discussions on track, send a direct message to @SHaines here on the forum, or use the Contact Us form to message the Community Team.

    In the meanwhile, please use the Report option if you see a post that doesn't fit within the forum rules.

    Thanks!

Teams & Riders Froome Talk Only

Page 184 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Jul 8, 2013
57
0
0
Visit site
the sceptic said:
Armstrong set his record after a rest day, and we all know what happens then dont we?
Also, if everyone was fresh in this tour, why is Froome the only one climbing at Armstrong levels while the rest of the peloton is at "clean" level?

They have done only 1 climb at pVAM, its not enough data.
 
Mar 18, 2009
2,553
0
0
Visit site
Zam_Olyas said:
Bicycling Power Cycling Training by Hunter Allen, Dr. Andy Coggan.

Actually, it is "Training and Racing with a Powermeter"

But, Hunter's opinion is his own, and I wasn't aware of it until stumbling across his post just now.

*Advertisement Link removed by Parrulo*
 
Jun 18, 2009
1,225
1
0
Visit site
You probably should have included the rest of his diatribe:

"Why is he so dominant this year? Superior coaching and training by and with power . Do you think Contador and Valverde are looking at their PMC's after every stage? Do you think Contador and team coaches(do they even have those on Saxo?) even know what a TSS is? Let me assure you. The boys at Sky are and have been for quite a while. Sometimes the old adage, "Train smarter, not harder" is really true.


Hunter Allen

Buy your Wattage based training plan ONLINE!"

So, I just buy my training plan online and I too can hit these numbers. Cool!

Hunter Allen has about as much credibility as Lance Armstrong in my book. Where was the suspicion when he was viewing these 6.7 w/kg hours? Or when he was riding on the second dirtiest domestic team in US history?

Sorry, no sale. Nice thread though, it should be fun to read later.
 
Moose McKnuckles said:
And this qualifies him to say Froome is clean?

LOL.

Dunno, Senor Coogan seems to think so.

http://www.peakscoachinggroup.com/

Our average athlete increases their power at threshold over 12% in the first six week! What will you do with your 12%? Upgrade to Cat 3? Crush the town line sprint? Drop the competition on the Gran Fondo big climb? By increasing your power, you will be able to achieve your goals.

Imagine the moment; winning the National Championship, finishing the Big Gran Fondo, getting your Category upgrade or just crushing your buddies on the Saturday fast ride! Envision yourself breaking one hour for 40km time trial. Visualize hitting your target weight and fitness. We all ride for a reason, make this season the reason to achieve.
 
sprenten said:
Then you are wrong. Froome makes me a skeptic, but I realize he previously has shown superlative performance only to see that performance wane on successive days unlike other riders who somehow keep that performance. Dopers hold fitness longer, suffer less fatigue, and don't see as big a drop in performance at altitude. If Froome is doped we will see near record times at Ventoux and Le Alpe regardless if he has to defend or not and he will defend the final two mountain stages with ease.
The thing is that you didn't even bother to read piles of data compiled in clinic. I know the road you are heading, it's been done many times before, especially with Armstrong. It's wide-eyed, country boy, naive approach 'the rider x makes me very skeptic, I wouldn't say he is doping because ________ (fill with whatever you want). And then the farce goes on for 10+ pages regurgitating all the little things said person can think of (marginal gains, special fabric, bilharzia etc.). And all that so that in some point in time you could say 'well he never tested positive'. So let me spare you and us all the unnecessary bull****. There is no smoking gun.
The only good thing Armstrong fiasco brought is that we now know the pattern. If you come up from obscurity to obliterate the field of dopers you say you had a disease. Suddenly you are best climber and best TT-er in the world, change of position, wind tunnel, loss of weight. You are beating known dopers, peloton is cleaner, you are training harder than anyone else and you have more scientific approach. I'm sure that before the Tour is over we will hear that there is something special when it comes to Froomes cadence.
Regarding near record on Alpe. Top 20 is not company I would like to be in if I'm clean. Of course, word is that Froome said 38 minutes is possibility. But since that is slower than Pantani he is in the clear.
 
Hunter Allen is a former professional road racer who spent 17 years racing in Europe and the Americas. After his retirement he became a USA Cycling elite level coach, certified nutritional consultant, yoga teacher and tai chi instructor.

Allen made his name, however, by co-founding the Peaks Coaching Group and co-creating the CyclingPeaks software, which is now TrainingPeaks WKO+, one of the most advanced power analysis packages available. He also co-wrote Training and Racing with a Power Meter, the power training bible.

BikeRadar: What do you think has led to the increase in popularity of power meters?

HA: Back when we launched CyclingPeaks software in 2003 it was all about education, so my first four or five years were 'educate, educate, educate'. That culminated with a book and speaking tours to teach coaches about it. I think that [education] is the underlying theme and that has propagated to thousands of coaches, and then the coaches have disseminated that information to their athletes.

The second part of it is usage by the pros. Lance Armstrong with his SRM or Jens Voigt or David Millar with his PowerTap – that’s exciting for the normal athlete to see. The third thing is that it just works. There are no ifs, ands or buts. Train with it [power meter] and get stronger. There’s the quantitative measurement and you see that you really improve right there on your computer screen. That gets you excited and you tell people about it.
[/B]
Do you personally train with power?

When I was a pro we didn’t have them [power meters]. I was a pro in the mid-90s and we just had downloadable heart rate monitors. I have reams and reams of three-ring binders full of heart rate graphs. An athlete approached me after I retired asking to be coached with one of these things [power meter] and I said, ‘Sure, I’d be glad to.’ That was back in ’98, ’99. Once we started sending spreadsheets back and forth, I bought one because I had no idea what 300 watts was. Then I decided that I had to go and train again, in what I call the data collection phase; that’s the first step.

What are the steps to training with power now?

Now we have more of a process. Instead of just randomly going out and doing rides, we do testing. We do a 20-minute test to see if we can figure out where your threshold is. Then we do our power profile test, where we get your best sprint, your best one-minute and your best five-minute efforts, and we create this thing called your power profile. That tells us your strengths and weaknesses. That first month is all about collecting data.

What do you see as the power meter’s greatest benefit?

It’s hard to say because there are so many benefits, and they’re all really good.

The power camp provides plenty of training time, or as they like to call it, data gathering:

A 'data gathering' ride at Peak Coaching Group's Spring Power Camp

Top three, then...

Number one is the planning. I can actually plan my training around the response I want to get; this is called the dose and response system. Pacing is also a very, very big part. On-the-bike pacing in an event is very important, whether that’s a time trial, a criterium, a road race or even a breakaway. We often lose sight of the fact that this sport really is a sport of pacing. So we’ve got pre, during and then the post side, the actual analysis side; figuring out what the data means – did I improve, and how much can I handle?

Has coaching changed because of the use of power meters?

Now, I have a very clear understanding of what needs to be done to elicit a certain response. Before, if we wanted to improve your ability to go hard for a short period of time and recover quickly, we knew to do short intervals. Now, there are wattage numbers that we are trying to hit, a goal effort. It’s changed the prescription side of the coaching.

Does volume still count for what it did before the popularity of the power meter?

That has changed. There are a lot of these old myths that have been propagated throughout the years – base training for two months, riding really slow, or whatever. Those things work well for pros, but are just silly for the rest of us. If you’ve got eight to 10 hours a week to train, you can’t afford to ride slow. It does mean that you’ve got to keep a higher level of fitness throughout the season and take more of these smaller rest periods.

What's the biggest mistake you see people make when training with a power meter?

They don’t value the cumulative power of all of the data. It gives you your training stress and tells you how much you can handle over three months, four months, six months... It allows you to look at it in that periodic type of way. What you really need to understand is how it all builds together. It can tell you your chronic training load [what you do every day], but you have to account for that. If you just ride, collect information and look at it in the performance manger chart in our WK0 software it can tell you a whole lot about what you can handle.

How did the idea to develop the software come about?

A client, Kevin Williams, and I went to the first power seminar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2001 or 2002. The whole time, all those guys [those presenting at the conference] said was, 'Man, the software sucks'. My client was a programmer and said he could make the software. So just like the stories you’ve heard, on a napkin over lunch we started thinking of how to make CyclingPeaks software. That was the tipping point then.

Anyone wanting to know more about training with a power meter may be interested in a competition being run on Peaks Coaching Group's new fan page on Facebook. Top prize in the Max Watts 1420 Fan Contest is a free trip to the Spring Power Camp with Hunter Allen and Scott Moninger. The week-long training camp features a blend of learning about power training, on-the-road coaching and plenty of miles to finish off base training and get ready for the race season.It's held in April in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

http://www.bikeradar.com/fitness/article/interview-trainingpeaks-wko-co-founder-hunter-allen--24981/
 
acoggan said:
As I have said many times before, I don't think you can draw any solid conclusions re. who is/isn't doping based on power data.

What about power data, which places a rider near the top of the doped performances of all time, combined with the rider's history, which is very very unremarkable? Would you not expect a rider with the potential to achieve a VO2Max of 90 to have blazed his way through the junior and U23 ranks?
 
Jul 8, 2009
323
0
0
Visit site
sprenten said:
Let's see, you are comparing times from a cat 1 climb which tops out below 1400m between different tours as proof of doping without taking into the context of fatigue accumilated that day or of prior days. More data points are needed other the climb to Bonascre and the time trial which only confirmed the time differences on Bonascre. There is a fine line between skepticism and fanaticism unlike the grey area which seperates definitely not doped and definitely doped.

Well I'm no fanatic if that is your insinuation. Call me a misanthropic, nihilistic cynic and we will call it a day. Most of us here have watched all the 6.5 - 7w/kg performances of Armstrong, Riis, Pantani, Ullrich and Indurain and they were not so long ago as everyone keeps attempting to remind us. Frankly I find this all rather funny. I guess Brailsford's placating pitch on human evolution's stupendous effects on future performances seeped into the consciousness of most and found a home. You still have not said who will challenge him. And if the challengers are all at or below baseline performances then how will YOU know that Froome is doped or not if he only follows wheels to Paris, which, as it stands currently, looks pretty prescient. In other words, who is going to push him to his limits? I would say no one in this tour my friend. These guys have been weighed, measured and filleted. I also find it fascinating that if you take Froome out of the tour, it all of a sudden becomes wide open and competitive!
 
Jun 18, 2009
1,225
1
0
Visit site
BTW, I agree that the Outside article has some questionable points. Mainly, I just don't think that under the right set of circumstances, 6.5 w/kg for 20:00 is impossible without doping. That said, it's nice that someone is at least asking the question because his performance relative to his competition is pretty unbelievable, particularly for a guy who wasn't exactly a world-beater in his early years.

While I find completely moronic is Allen's proclamation that "he's clean, get over it". That's right out of the Lance playbook. "don't ask questions, just trust us", alone with a visceral, angry tone directed at anyone who dares ask the question.

He doth protest a little too much.
 

TRENDING THREADS