85. AM I DOING BETTER? A SIMPLE WAY TO VISUALIZE CYCLING PERFORMANCE

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

In other sports like running and swimming the competition distance is fixed (for example 5k, 10k, marathon), so it is very simple to quantify and compare performance just using the finishing time of each race. If you do 2min less on a marathon, you have improved - quite simple.

On the other hand, in cycling every time the conditions (distance, elevation gain) of the whole race and/or of specific all-out efforts done within a race, are different and so it is not possible to use just ‘time’ to cover a certain distance as a performance marker. Of course, power output (average power or normalized power if the effort is stochastic) can give an idea about the level of a certain performance. However, given that each time the duration of maximal efforts is different (unless you are doing a standardized test on a fixed duration, 5min all-out for example), it is not straightforward to evaluate a specific performance. Are you performing better or worse than in the past? For example, if a cyclist performs an all-out effort of - let’s say - 17min35sec duration and he never performed a maximal effort of that specific duration in the past, how can we evaluate his performance?

I just started to use and wanted to share this method. It is using the vertical distance from the power-time curvilinear relationship from the specific effort considered.

To see and use this methods you can download the excel file with calculations and explanations here!