Eddie and I have just got back from two days in the sun on the Spanish island of Mallorca where we met up with 4 times World Track Champion and Individual Pursuit World Record Holder, Sarah Hammer, to help her out with her training on the Wattbike as she looks forward to London 2012 Olympics.
Sarah is coached by Andy Sparks of Empower Coaching Systems who was keen to see how he could incorporate the Wattbike not only into Sarah’s training but also into the coaching of some of the road athletes under his guidance.
We’re always interested to find out how people first hear about the Wattbike and Andy told us he saw the bike in action when the Australian squad bought along Wattbikes to the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland.
Andy and Sarah took us for a coffee where Eddie gave them the history of how and why the Wattbike was developed, who is using the Wattbike at the elite level and the kind of results being achieved by nations including Australia, China and Hong Kong (Australia have been putting their Wattbikes to good use and won a stack of medals at the 2011 World Track Championships).
Eddie is in the enviable position of knowing a lot of data from working with elite track cyclists from around the world but, ever the professional, he never shares training info with anybody (not even me, even after I’ve plied him with 4 strong coffees, believe me I’ve tried!).
On reaching Andy’s base where two Wattbikes took centre stage, Sarah changed into her World Champion’s kit (and don’t the rainbow stripes look pretty good!) while Eddie took Andy through some firmware updates. For me, I just wanted to see what shapes Sarah could produce on the Wattbike and it didn’t take too long to see why she is a multiple World Champion and World Record Holder - really impressive stuff!
Eddie spent some time explaining how they could get the best use out of the Expert Software and I think both Sarah and Andy were surprised to see the quality and level of detail that the Wattbike produces; they were pretty blown away to hear that measurements are recorded every 100th of a second. These measurements then produce the numbers that all Wattbike users benefit from such as Power, Cadence, Speed and the Polar View to illustrate pedalling technique.
Crucial to any good structured training program on the Wattbike is the use of appropriate gearing on the bike using the air brake. We sometimes see users cranking the air brake up to 10 in an attempt to produce maximum Watts when with a higher leg speed it’s generally easier to record a much higher Peak Power at a lower level of resistance. No such worries on this visit and Eddie quickly worked out how to match Sarah’s gearing on her track bike (Wattbike Pro and Trainer Gear Table), enabling her to replicate training sessions she would normally have to do on the track.
Sarah is an interesting athlete because she races the Omnium event which consists of five track disciplines; 1) Flying 200m 2) Points Race 3) Elimination Race 4) Individual Pursuit 5 )Scratch Race and 6) Time Trial. It’s a rare track cyclist that can dominate all five events and when you think Sarah also holds the World Record for the Individual Pursuit (3km) she really is an incredible athlete.
I’ve seen Sarah ride a few times at the UCI Track World Cup in Manchester and when I was doing some research for the trip it dawned on me that her Individual Pursuit World Record at 3’22”269 is less than 3 seconds slower than the Team Pursuit World Record. Sarah’s Individual Pursuit World Record time is also faster than the winning time from the Team Pursuit in Apeldoorn, Netherlands in 2011.
We finished up the visit by looking into the possibilities of providing Sarah with a Wattbike to use in the pits for warm-up/cool down at some of the 2012 World Cup rounds and the World Championship in the coming season; regular readers of the Wattbike blog will remember that Australia, Holland, China and Hong Kong were all using Wattbikes to warm up/cool down at the 2011 WC in Appeldoorn, Holland.
Elite track cyclists have very specific warm-up/cool down sessions (and particularly so for a busy omnium competition) and the Wattbike appeals to Sarah as she can formulate a competition schedule at her training base and replicate this exactly at any venue in the world, on any Wattbike, as all bikes are factory-calibrated, for life.
Andy also has number of male road cyclists under his guidance from Turkey who will also be using the Wattbike, initially concentrating on pedalling technique using the Polar View then moving on to sessions supplementing their road work. We’ll also catch up with Andy in future months to find out how some of his Under-23 track riders are getting on.
Many thanks to Sarah and Andy for being so accommodating with us, it gets us as excited to see elite athletes using the Wattbike as it does to hear about people dramatically improving their sportive times through following a training plan on the Wattbike. It reinforces the point that you can train smarter using exactly the same training kit as elite athletes on a Wattbike.