T-Max Time

So I'm a little slow to post this, but I tried out my T-max test on Thursday while home at lunch.
I was talking to Kevin about the T-max intervals and he suggested trying them out on the CompuTrainer so that I could lock in the wattage at 310 and focus on just pedaling my legs off. Hrrrm... sounded like a good idea!

I hooked everything up and started to warm up. After 10 minutes or so I calibrated the CT and started adding some wattage on. Strangely, the CompuTrainer and my PowerTap didn't match up wattage. The PowerTap showed me about 30 watts lower than the CompuTrainer. Strange I thought. So I tightened up the resistance unit and re-calibrated. It was still off.

Well, I thought I'd go ahead and run the test anyway. So I cranked it up to 310 watts and waited for the pain to set in. I purposely didn't watch the timer when I started for fear of saying "5 minutes is pretty good and this is hard, so I'll shut it down".

After a few minutes I thought "this is actually pretty easy". I checked my PowerTap. 280 watts. Well, I know I can push this for quite some time. I've been doing it on the Nebo Ridge Trainer every Tuesday for an hour at a time. I attempted to wind it up a little to get the PowerTap in sync with the CompuTrainer. Ok, that was harder!

After what seemed like forever I was pretty spent and gave it up. Upon review of my data I spent over 7 minutes on the test. Well, that just can't be right.

Either I should be able to push more wattage in my PPO or I wasn't pushing out 310 watts for my timed test. I feel that the latter is the case.

My plan now is to retake the Tmax time test on my trainer just as I set it up when I did the PPO test. I hope to find some time tomorrow to do that test. We will see.

Until then... pedal on and be safe!