by CycleOps Power Master Trainer, Charles "Joey" Adams

The “off-season” is almost behind us and the “in-season” is just on the horizon. Chances are you spent a fair amount of time honing your aerobic base, and you spent some time in the gym lifting some weights. While you were lifting weights, you likely saw increases in the amount you were able to lift and the reps you were able to pump out. You did this by (hopefully) manipulating the F.I.T.T. rule of training. F is for frequency, I is for Intensity, and T is for the amount of training time, and the last T is for Type of training.

You can now use this knowledge of the F.I.T.T. principle and apply it to mountain biking. Sure, you could do it the old way of going out and hammering a few days a week. That would take care of all the variables at once – and quickly get you the same old results. This may or may not be to your liking, or worse may or may not help you realize your full potential. We all have a limited amount of time, and we all want the most from our training time. The key in creating your training plan is to generally manipulate one variable at a time to create optimal stress. Manipulate too many, too little, or too much at once, and the system rebels or stagnates. You get less out of more! Ouch!

Training with the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System has been a powerful tool for me to target my training in ways like never before.

Because of the explosive nature of mountain bike racing, using a power meter is the best way to gauge and focus my efforts. Training with a PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System on my mountain bike has allowed me to target specific training goals that were never possible with a heart rate monitor or even with a road PowerTap.

by Melanie McQuaid

For the last many years that I have trained, first as a mountain bike athlete and more recently as an off road triathlete, I would put about 80% of my riding hours on a road bike. This came naturally as I have always done my interval training using a power meter, and up until 2008, I did not use a power meter on my mountain bike. The time I spent riding trails focused more on quality endurance and technical training.

This winter I started to employ the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Hub System off road. I have replaced one of my hill workouts with another off road workout on hills and have started the process of data collection and analysis to compare my ability in January to my hopefully improving ability in March. What is interesting is the comparison of the hill workouts done on the road to my hill workouts done on the mountain bike. I have no doubt that some of my observations can help me to better plan for these workouts and how to tailor my training program to better reflect what I am going to encounter racing. Many of these observations merely confirm what we already know are the differences between mountain bike racing and road racing. However, the actual quantification of these differences is of interest.

The PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System is now available. The product has been tested extensively by our Engineering team as well as several pro athletes like Jeremiah Bishop, Julian Absalon, Conrad Stoltz, Melanie McQuaid, Wendy Simms, Manual Prado, Danny Pate and Rocky Reifenstuhl.

What went into bringing this product to market? We got the inside scoop from PowerTap Product Manager Jesse Bartholomew and one of CycleOps Power's engineers who worked extensively on the project, Jordan Roessingh.

Why did CycleOps Power decide to create a disc brake PowerTap hub?

JESSE: CycleOps Power has the benefit of having very passionate customers that aren't afraid to let us know what they want. We do our best to develop products that meet those needs, and the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub is a result of that. In addition, the benefits of using a PowerTap only increase with the more data you collect, so it only makes sense to allow our customers do so in any discipline of cycling they choose.

I wanted to give you all a race report from my first race of the year, as well as my first-ever multi-sport event. This weekend I raced in the White Sands Duathlon, held at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. It is a race in the Southwest Triathlon Racing Series, the oldest series of multi-sport racing events in the US. The race had a wide range of age and ability categories, and there were some strong early-season racers to contend with. Racers from El Paso and western Texas, Albuquerque, and southern New Mexico participated in the event. The race consisted of a 5K run on a rough dirt road with some sandy sections, followed by a 30K bike on nice paved military base roads: flat to rolling terrain. and some crosswinds.