The Sirens Song - A Power Meter Tale of Warning

I have been around Power Meters off and on and, last year, two of my team mates had SRMs and were trying to seduce me into buying one as well. I was tempted but, in the back of my mind, I already knew I was going to quit racing at the end of the season so the investment didn't make sense.

Fast forward 6 months and I've been convinced to race again and have a new PM lashed to my bike.

I've been racing for 20+ years and after plenty of trail and error and after getting my coaching license, I have a pretty good idea of how my body responds to training; I know what I need to do to get to race weight or get race fit. I also know what doesn't work for me.

It used to be that I would block out 6 week training cycles and pretty much stick to them. I'd put in the time and the work would generate predictable results. But that damn PM lashed to my bike has ruined all that.

It started slowly. At first it was a simple enjoyment of a new toy. I'd play with the buttons as I rode and see what I could see. I used to enjoy the the terrain that I passed over as I logged the miles, but now I found I couldn't wait to finish my ride and go download it onto my computer so I could see what I had ridden. It wasn't about the road anymore, it was about the cool charts and graphs I could make. I could barely remember any of the real details of what I'd just ridden.

I few rides later and, to my horror, I discovered that I had lost my ability to speak a single sentence that wasn't riddled with acronyms. I was becoming obsessed with generating numbers that were comparable to others. I needed to see numbers that I knew I had generated in the past (through testing). I began second guessing everything I knew and everything I was seeing. I was constantly readjusting my schedule to fit with some idea of training that hadn't every worked well for me. How is it that I could forget everything I knew, disregard all the tell tale signs and ride like a big dummy?

I should have listened to the cremudgeons who howled their warnings at me from the front gates of my LBS. They warned me that this could happen. The had tried to dissaude me with tales of other riders who had suffered a similar fate but I was deaf to their pleas. I had been lured by my PMs Siren Song and now lay spent on the sofa with the debris of several wasted weeks of training scattered all around me.

In retrospect, I should have ridden as I had in the past and used my PM to collect data. After I had some fitness I could have then used the information wisely instead of foolishly getting caught up in the the technology and everyone else's ideas of how I should train.

Luckily, I have survived to tell my cautionary tale but this season is, for the most part, a write-off. Now I need to dig down and humbly begin again.