Power test

So I've got this fancy exercise bike that tells you how much power you're putting out. My buddy, Nick, who lives in Omaha (also an Indy transplant) rides to work and coerces me to go on long Saturday morning rides as well. However, this Saturday I convinced him to come over and do a Power Test to find out his functional threshold power. You can then repeat this every month to see how you are progressing in terms of fitness.

The test can be done two ways. The first is to just do an hour "time trial." That is, go for 60 minutes as hard as you can, but still keeping up the same effort for the whole hour. It's a tricky thing to determine.

The other way (the way that he did it) was to warm up for 10 minutes, go all out for 5 minutes (to wake up your body) then take it easy for 10, then time trial it for 20 minutes followed by a cool down. Then you take the 95% of the average over the 20 minutes and use that as your power.

After seeing him do this (I packed and did some laundry and tried to encourage him as much as possible) I decided not to put myself through a similar hell. I also certainly didn't meet my goal of 100 miles over the weekend ... ended up doing an easy ride for an hour while I watched football on Sunday. It gets so ... boring. And painful. Since you're not moving and there's no cushion between you and the "road."