So what sort of power are you averaging? What are you holding when you’re just tapping out tempo?
“It’s around 310 watts (a measure of bike power output) for a period of over four hours – or whatever it was, four hours 12 minutes.*
This was Cameron Wurf talking to an interviewer about his effort in 2017 when he raced the Ironman Triathlon World Championships. He rode “off the front,” which means all alone, with nobody to pace off of.
What is important here is the pacing.
It wasn’t 350 watts for an hour and then 290 W. It was 310 for the whole race.
This is how do our best efforts in a race. They are almost always done with an even split.
It’s not that some people do better by going out too hard, or too slow, its almost everyone does their best effort when they are able to find their optimal average pace and then hold it.
What do we learn from this?
While many of us talk about performing best at the last minute with a project, or not starting until the end, or going out guns blazing too early, it seems that this could still be our resistance at work.
That is possibly our focus, to elevate our performance across a lifetime, but also elevating vitality. Beginning with the end in mind.*
Knowing it’s going to feel harder later in the project as our resources dry up, so, remaining mindful of putting in enough work early.
*This equated to an average speed of 42.76km/hr, for a 180km bike ride, after a 3.8km swim and before a 42.2km marathon. Cameron was 72kg on race day.
