Well, aside from the Crash in the middle of the month its been a good month. Plenty of hard efforts and the Majorca trip was great. I did an FTP test a couple of weeks after the crash and wasn't back to full fitness but still held an FTP of 285w. I reckon I'm higher now and will do a test after the Fred Whitton Challenge which is next weekend. My all-time best 5,20 and 60 minute powers in 2007 came a week after the FWC. Only 9 weeks to La Marmotte, gulp.
So, the implementation of W'bal in GoldenCheetah has been a bit of a challenge. The Science I wanted to explain what we've done and how it works in this blog post, but realised that first I need to explain the science behind W'bal, W' and CP. W' and CP How hard can you go, in watts, for half an hour is going to be very different to how hard you can go for say, 20 seconds. And then thinking about how hard you can go for a very long time will be different again. But when it comes to reviewing and tracking changes in your performance and planning future workouts you quickly realise how useful it is to have a good understanding of your own limits. In 1965 two scientists Monod and Scherrer presented a ‘Critical Power Model’ where the Critical Power of a muscle is defined as ‘the maximum rate of work that it can keep up for a very long time without fatigue’. They also proposed an ‘energy store’ (later to be termed W’, pronounced double-ewe-prime) that represente