Comparing yourself to the table

You cannot be a cyclist and look at the Coggin Table without asking which of the 52 training levels reflects my abilities. The easiest way is to determine your own P/W ratio and look for it in the FT column. This process was described in the last page.

Modeling a Cyclist

When we shortly start modeling riding scenarios, we will want to model a representative cyclist such as recreational or Elite. Using the Coggin table, you select which of the 52 rows you want to be representative.

Suppose you are looking for Mid Range Excellent Cyclist. You want a male weighing 160 lbs and a female at 125 lbs, with masses of 72.57 and 56.7 kgs respectively.  The upper row in the table provides their P/W numbers and the lower row multiplies these by their mass to get their absolute numbers. Remember to use the following to compute your W values:

m_(kg) = m_(lb) × 0.45359237

What do you do with these numbers?

Now that we have these numbers, what do you do with them? Here is one example. Assume you have already computed the total effort in Joules to climb the Alpe d’Huez. You then divide that by the FT Absolute Power number, and you get the total climb time.

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