Still ill

Grumpy Bob's relapsing cold just keeps giving. He decided to miss the club mince pie evening due to coughing and spluttering (and a generally public spirited notion that he should avoid infecting his clubmates). Which was a shame, since he rather likes mince pies.

On the training front, he's not done any training since last Saturday's turbo session. In fact he's only done about 6 miles this week, as he's not been sleeping and has a rough old cough. Last Saturday's turbo session was a pretty good progressive power interval session, and was fitted in to a day or so in which he felt pretty well recovered after the first few days of what appeared to be a minor cold.

In the meantime, Grumpy Bob has been investigating methods of analysing power meter output*. His regular training diary doesn't seem to offer much in the power analysis stakes (though perhaps he's just missing something). Unfortunately most sports training software seems to be aimed at the Windows market, with some programmes available for the Mac. Grumpy Bob is a Linux user, and did find an app called Golden Cheetah, which is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It was a trivial installation, though it doesn't seem straightforward to download Polar data directly - Grumpy Bob finds he has to use a Windows app to download data files.

That being said, Golden Cheetah does seem to be able to generate considerable power analysis of power training sessions**, and perhaps will enable Grumpy Bob to train more effectively. Once his damned cold gets better.

* Grumpy Bob remains a little unconvinced by the value of power training other than as a reporting tool.
** Oh, and he bought a copy of Allen & Coggan's Training and Racing with a Power Meter, to try and assemble a picture of what all these data really mean.