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Anatomy of a headwind

This past Tuesday I drove over to Columbia for a workout. Whenever I need to do intervals of even a moderate length of time that is where I go. No stop signs, very little traffic, basically flat roads and relative closeness to home make it the ideal place for me to do this type of workout.

The days leading up to Tuesday had been breezy and coming out of the south, as is often the case at this time of year, when temperatures begin to rise and the warm air is pulled up from the Gulf of Mexico. I will not go crazy with hyperbole about the wind. When I look back at the weather data, the winds were supposedly right about 18mph and gusting to around 28mph. I will only say that when you are riding straight into those wind speeds, it sure feels like the wind is blowing stronger.

The planned workout was four, 5-minute efforts at 280-290 watts with 2.5 minutes at 180-200 watts between each effort as a recovery. Cranking out the watts when pedaling into that strong headwind proved to be relatively easy, but it did not make for fast riding. The fun part came when it was time to return to the car.

Below is a chart of the workout. I only included the last threee 5-minute efforts for a reason that is too long too explain. But, that is good because I covered basically the exact same distance in the 20 minutes ( three 5-minute efforts plus two 2.5-minute recovery periods) into the headwind than I did in the 13-14 minutes of easy pedaling with the tailwind.

The purple lines are the wattage and blue lines are the speed. Basically, I was going maybe 15mph when doing an above threshold effort into the wind. The change in direction is rather obvious as the speeds shoot up to about 25mph average while only averaging about 150 watts.