Sprinting, Huzzah!

"It's every man for himself and let the Devil take the hindmost."

Miss and Out a.k.a. Devil Take the Hindmost is one of my favorite track events. Actually, almost all track events are my favorite, except TT-style ones like pursuit, kilo, hour-record-attempts, etc. DTTH is usually run on a velodrome (250m or 333m, but NOT the port-a-track 143.2742 or whatever variety). In DTTH, every few laps, the official rings the bell indicating a sprint lap. The last person to cross the line is pulled from the field. The race continues this way until only two riders are left and, on the final sprint lap, the two race each other man-up. It's great fun to watch and to see who just squeaks by and who just gets pipped at the end. It's not important to be the fastest, just fast enough -- at least until the end.

So we played a little DTTH on the Watermelon Crit course on Livingston campus today, though we rode the course in reverse for safety's sake, all right-hand turns. What I discovered was that having a PowerTap for these occasions is pretty friggin' awesome. Here are some interesting figures (p.s. I won, so that means I did a total of six sprints):

Max Instant Power:
Sprint 1- 872 Watts
Sprint 2- 1023 Watts
Sprint 3- 1062 Watts
Sprint 4- 991 Watts
Sprint 5- 1082 Watts
Sprint 6- 1206 Watts

I led out Sprint 1 for 35 seconds averaging 350 Watts. In Sprint 3, my 20second power was 890 Watts, the longest extended period of high power output of the session. My optimal sprint cadence seems to be around 130-140 rpm. Not sure what that means but I like it.

I also like that I did 1200 Watts in the cold during mid-March. Sprinting is awesome squared!