More power testing


This evening I went out to do another power test with my Stryd. Last time I did that was at the track by the National Stadium, but a friend of ours was in town so after seeing him for dinner, it was too late to schlep out to Kallang. Instead, I’d run down past the Tanjong Pagar railway station, and back along the road from Mount Faber.

Power tests are fairly horrible; you do three minutes as hard as you can, recover for thirty and then run nine more, again, as hard as you can. I couldn’t face being out that long, so I waited two songs on my phone before putting on Iron Maiden for the 9 minute stretch.

And it was a stretch; in the first three minutes I did 800m (so almost thirty seconds slower than at the track on Saturday) and in the nine minute section I was even slower, doing around a 4:09 pace. On the one hand, I am pretty sure I could have gone harder in spikes at the track, but on the other, I know that most of my running isn’t going to be at the track but on bumpy roads, with less lightweight shoes, so perhaps it’s for the best.

I went home and found out that my Stryd has a funky sensor built in, where I can start and stop the timer just by double tapping the heart rate monitor, if my hands are too sweaty to cope with a stopwatch. That feels a bit like showing off, but also kind of fun. I fed the output of my runs into a calculator, got some slightly disappointing indications of my power output (but then, it’s all kind of relative, so what does this mean?) and then sat on the sofa and perspired. Rational, power-based training commences next week…


Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.