Last week I posted an article that showed the optimal power pacing strategy for a 40 km cycling time trial where there is a headwind for the first half and a tailwind for the return leg. In that article, I used CCAP as the power metric to constrain the power output for the cyclist in the time trial. In this post, we will take a second look at the optimization performed for the situation where the overall power is constrained to 250 watts and the wind speed is 5 m/s.

A classic scenario for time trial pacing strategies is to consider how to ride a race course that has a headwind for the first half followed by an equal tailwind for the second half of the course. This is a useful scenario to analyze to become better at pacing cycling time trials because it often occurs for out and back race courses. By using Optimal Cycling, we can systematically analyze the difference between riding such scenarios using a steady pacing strategy compared to the optimized strategy that the program solves …

This is a page containing additional plots for the article Time Trial Pacing Strategy for a 40km TT with Headwind & Tailwind. It contains the optimized power plots for a racer that outputs 300 watts and 350 watts.
Optimized power output plots for a rider at 300 watts, plotted by position:
 
 
Optimized power output plots for a rider at 300 watts, plotted by time:
 
Optimized power output plots for a rider at 350 watts, plotted by position:
 
Optimized power output plots for a rider at 350 watts, plotted by time:

An update has been released for Optimal Cycling to address compatibility issues with the OpenCL syntax.

I have submitted NotScripts v1.1.0 today to the Opera Extension moderators that supports Opera 11.10. It should be out for download in a couple of days. There was a syntax change to postMessage in the Extensions API. I have also fixed the issue where NotScripts would list scripts from multiple sites if there were iFrames so NotScripts now works properly (it was caused by a workaround to a bug in the Extensions API of previous versions of Opera).