Cycling by the Numbers: Gearing, Power Zones, Normalised Power, Training Load & Climbing

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Build a two-way gear table for a 50/34 chainset and an 11–28 cassette: metres travelled per crank turn and road speed at 90 rpm, then the cadence a target speed needs and the bike's gear range.
• Measure the percentage jump between neighbouring cogs, find the largest step, count the small-ring gears that duplicate the big ring's range, and flag the jumps a rider will feel.
• Turn six riders' 20-minute test results into threshold power and W/kg, convert Lena's zone table from percentages into watts, and let XLOOKUP name the zone of every effort in her session.
• Smooth a surging ride file with a 30-second rolling average, raise it to the 4th power, take the mean and the 4th root to get normalised power, and compare it with the plain average as a variability index.
• Rate twelve rides by intensity factor and training stress, give each ride its ISO week number and total the stress per week, the load figure the next lesson builds on.
• Turn 21 days of training stress into a slow fitness line (42 days) and a fast fatigue line (7 days), read the form on the last day before the event and chart all three.
• Add up the forces on a 6.5% climb, build a speed-to-power table, look up the speed Lena can hold at 230 W and turn it into a climb time.
• Set a target power for each of eight segments from a terrain table, estimate time and work per segment, total the finish time and chart the pacing plan.