Originally Posted by rm -rf

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Stats!
So, you also like stats. Golden Cheetah is free software, with tons of charts and trend graphs. You can use it for formal training, or just to look at your riding. It's easy to get started, with lots of auto defaults, then you can modify the charts later as you want.

GC will automatically calculate your FTP after a few rides. And track it over the season, too. (FTP is essentially the best power you could put out on a hard one hour ride.)

The most useful to me is the CP (Critical Power) chart. This tracks your best power for all time periods from a few seconds to the longest ride you've done. It fits a curve to a few best effort points to show a theoretical max effort curve. Your current ride is shown as a line on the chart, too.

This chart is helpful to give me an idea of my power numbers for about 30 seconds, about 60 seconds, and about 5 minutes, to pace my all-out efforts on short steep climbs.

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