Power Meter? What Power Meter?

My Power Tap Power Meter Is Acting Up

Before I explain about my Power Tap… what’s up with “up?”  As in “acting up.”   We all know what it means to “act up,” right?  What’s the opposite?  Acting down?  Gotta love the English language, even when it defies common sense.  But what’s common sense, really?  Nevermind.  This is not a philosophy lecture. Sorry.

Power Tap hub on rear bike wheel

So my Power Tap was acting strange last week.  Power Tap is a brand of power meter on my bike.  It measures how much energy I produce in watts or joules.  It suddenly stopped  displaying my watts the other day while I was spinning in my house.

Power Tap indicator (yellow ).

I plan my workouts by that thing.    It’s my coach when coach Sami isn’t hovering over me telling me what to do.  I felt lost.  I didn’t know what to do. How was I going to attain my target of 200 watts for 5 minutes if I had no measurement of watts?

What Now?

I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept pedaling:  aimlessly pedaling.  For some time there was no focus in that workout and only the sound of the wheel spinning against the tension spindle.  But, after a little while, my legs started to talk to me.  It wasn’t obvious at first, because they speak a different language.  After several attempts of trying to get my attention, I heard them say I was going to slow. Then my knees spoke up and said I was mashing the pedals, to which the feet agreed.  My stomach was no help.  It just kept asking for solid food.  It was starting to get noisy with all that conversation.   I realized that I had trained so much over the last eight years that my body knew what to do.  All I had to do was listen to it.

I don’t know what kind of power I put out in that workout, but one thing is for sure.  I felt like I had a great workout.  Is it possible that we can listen to our bodies and know what to do rather than rely solely on numbers?  I’ve always thought so, and this workout just reinforced that idea.

I have a video that touches this subject.  It’s based on a Tweet that I read by the well-known triathlon coach, Brett Sutton.  Click here for that video.