In our corner: Power2Max power meters

Time to pay a little tribute to another of the great companies who support us. We told you about Velocite and why Alain and I love to ride the road bikes and why we are looking forward to the time trial / triathlon bike. Another company we are proud to have support us is Saxonar, the manufacturers of Power2Max power meters.

Why power?

Knowing how much power you are putting out whilst riding is an awesome tool to make your training more specific and to know what you are doing at all points in time. Many endurance athletes have been training with heart rate in the past to see how hard they were going. But heart rate is only one bit of information about your training: it tells you how much effort you are putting in, but it doesn't tell you what you are getting out of it. On a good day your heart rate might be lower, if you are very tired it might be affected, too. All this makes things complicated.

Power adds a really interesting part to the equation: what you are producing for the effort you put in. This helps you understand how your training is progressing, and it helps you pace your training and your races.

Dan Empfield from Slowtwitch used a great phrase to describe Ironman racing: it's a competition of who can whisper loudest. The race is so long that you can't just go out there and push hard. Otherwise you will go fast for the first few hours, but end up like this way before the finish line:

A power meter can be a great tool to help you figure out how hard to push, especially in the early phases of the race when the legs are fresh, the mind is impatient, and your energy seems infinite - after all you have rested before the big day and are ready to go.

Using the information we collect during training rides and performance tests, we can use the power meter to set power ceilings during the race to avoid going to hard at the wrong time. Expect some more nerdy posts about power analysis in the future!

About Saxonar / Power2Max

Saxonar is a new player on the power meter scene, having released their crank based power meter early 2011. They come from a automotive background, which means they know how to engineer reliable products that work in all sorts of conditions. Both Alain and I used to ride with other power meters - from SRM - and haven't regretted the switch.

The Power2Max are just as precise as the much more expensive products from the competition, and they offer convenience that other products don't have: you don't need to put anything else on the bike for it to work (no magnets, etc), and you can change the battery yourself when it eventually runs out - with other products you have to send it in.

Saxonar have also been super quick in rolling out different versions of their power meters, whether for standard cranks, compact cranks, and soon also for mountain bikes. Best of all, they are priced much more reasonably than SRMs or Quarqs, the other two big systems out there.

If you feel the urge to train with power, take a good look at them - their product is great and I'm more than happy to use it.