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See the latest rider data from the Giro d'Italia.
Stage 3: Auburn - Modesto - 196.2km
Miles: 121.9 KM: 196.2
Start: Tue, May 17: Auburn
Finish: Modesto
Start Time: 10:15am Finish ETA: 3:07-3:31pm
Winning race data file of Greg Henderson!
Greg Henderson showed that he could deliver Ben Swift to the line yesterday for the win and today, he showed everyone that he could win too! Greg literally out ‘powered’ all of the peloton in the last 436 meters to the line, where he averaged a nearly unbelievable 955 watts for 27 seconds at an average speed of 36.1mph. As the last man in the lead out train for Ben Swift, he launched the final attack to the line 436 meters out, and while his max wattage was a more mortal number of 1193 watts, his average for the 27 seconds at 955watts categorizes him as one of the world’s best at neuromuscular power fatigue resistance. When a rider can hold this much power for that long of a time, we say that he has above average fatigue resistance which means that his wattage does not decrease very much over the length of the effort. In the first five seconds of his sprint, Greg averaged 1052 watts, and in the next first 10 seconds his average was 1047, and at 20 seconds, his average was 1017, which makes Greg’s fatigue resistance incredibly high.
Greg’s final sprint was so long and effort so hard, that his heart rate continued to climb and maxed out 18 seconds AFTER he stopped pedaling at 197 beats per minute! Greg says, "It was pretty chaotic really. Jeremy Hunt brought up the pace and it was my job to take it from 500 meters out and I went Full gas for 300 meters and thought, oh, well they'll start coming around me now and I just couldn't feel anyone and so I thought, ‘I just keep going’ and I got to 150 meters and I was so lactic, so cross-eyed and just wanted to sit down, so blown that I thought I'd just keep my speed to the line and I was lucky that no one could catch me. I was so lactic that I couldn’t even do a victory salute.."
This final winning sprint was not the only effort Greg had to do in the race, as he had to do (12) shorter sprints in the 30 minutes leading up to the finish and each lasted from 8 to 12 seconds long, were over 850 watts and some even came within 5 seconds of each other. The circuits around Modesto were technical and fast, which made it tough for Greg to stay near the front and all those shorter sprints were necessary to maintain his position near the front and this makes his final effort even that much more impressive.
The stage overall for Greg was very similar to a Tour De France stage in terms of distance and intensity and how it unfolded with a quick start, relatively steady pace in the middle of the stage and then a very fast and hard final 30 minutes. Greg burned roughly 4600 calories, scored a TSS of 303 and his normalized power for the 5 hour 31 minute stage was 282. This was not an easy stage, although he did a decent job of staying out of the wind and conserving his energy since he didn’t pedal for 14.4% (47 minutes) of the time. As you compare this stage finish with the previous days finish, notice the Peak 20 second wattages in each stage, and on stage 2, Greg’s peak 20 seconds was 806 watts when leading out Ben Swift and today his peak 20 seconds was 1026 watts, which shows us that while he did a phenomenal effort today, he clearly could have done it yesterday as well. This stage win was the result of excellent positioning in the final corner of the race and superior fatigue resistance.
Another HUGE congratulations to Team Sky and thanks again for using TrainingPeaks! We are very proud of you guys!
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Power File analysis by Hunter Allen, co-founder of TrainingPeaks WKO+ software, co-author of “Training and Racing with a power meter” and Elite Cycling Coach. Hunter will be doing daily file analysis of power files and we’ll be posting them here for everyone to download and view. Hunter has marked up the WKO file for easy analysis by our readers along with adding some comments of his own to the Post ride notes section.
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