{"id":313,"date":"2011-08-01T18:32:29","date_gmt":"2011-08-01T23:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cycling.williams.edu\/?p=313"},"modified":"2011-08-01T18:32:29","modified_gmt":"2011-08-01T23:32:29","slug":"this-is-power-tap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/uncategorized\/this-is-power-tap\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Power Tap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Inspired by John&#8217;s update, I thought it was worthwhile to keep the blog rolling.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Fun&#8221; with power meters!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the good (bad?) things about cycling is that it&#8217;s so hard to get a completely quantitative measure for your fitness. Track athletes can trade 400 splits, swimmers can brag about their 200 fly time, and rowers can gauge their fitness by &#8230; er&#8230; whatever crew people actually do. Cycling is different. It&#8217;s a lot less clear exactly where your fitness is in comparison to others because of the huge number of variables that influence performance (terrain, quality of road, tire pressure, hydration\/nutrition, restedness, and whether or not you gave an arm and a leg just to buy that Zipp wheelset that looks so damn good). In short, it&#8217;s not easy to see exactly where you stand.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been using a heart rate monitor for a couple years now. While it&#8217;s certainly more useful than just going by RPE alone, in actuality it tells you <em>nothing <\/em> about how powerful you are. I just borrowed my dad&#8217;s Power Tap, which is a wheel that has a power meter built into the rear hub. In two days, I&#8217;ll be doing a 40-minute all-out time trial to see actually how much wattage I can produce. The prospect is at the same time terrifying and exciting. In all, it&#8217;s pretty cool to be told by a computer where exactly you stand.<\/p>\n<p>On a (barely) related note, I just might start calling the ark the &#8220;wattage cottage.&#8221; Yeah, I know I&#8217;ll probably be the only one. That&#8217;s okay. I&#8217;m used to that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why would anyone want to bike up Mount Greylock?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I actually don&#8217;t have a good answer to that question, but if you&#8217;re reading this then chances are you <em>also<\/em> have a distorted sense of what counts as &#8220;fun.&#8221; Therefore, you should all register for the Greylock Hillclimb. I&#8217;m missing convocation to go, so &#8220;doing schoolwork&#8221; or &#8220;studying&#8221; are poor excuses (as always).<\/p>\n<p>Not to be trumped by John, here are some more awesome cycling videos.<\/p>\n<p>1) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Y-z0Kh0pvNM&amp;feature=related\">An amazing save<\/a><\/p>\n<p>2) The only thing more awesome than racing up a 3000 ft. mountain? Racing <\/em>down<em> a 5000 ft. mountain&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bL_26bEpYhU\">without roads.<a \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inspired by John&#8217;s update, I thought it was worthwhile to keep the blog rolling. &#8220;Fun&#8221; with power meters! One of the good (bad?) things about cycling is that it&#8217;s so hard to get a completely quantitative measure for your fitness. Track athletes can trade 400 splits, swimmers can brag about their 200 fly time, and <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/uncategorized\/this-is-power-tap\/\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"sr-only\">Read more about This is Power Tap<\/span>[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2030,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cycling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}