WKO+, Decoupling, and Getting Worse Before Better

The WKO+ software is driving me nuts! It is quite powerful but not terribly user friendly. Then one comes across all those great articles and other write-ups that tell you that you can do this and that with WKO+ but trying to do this is of course a whole different story.

To be fair, I have not really had the chance to dive into it and really grok it.

The latest headache for me is trying to determine my heart rate and power decoupling. In short, the more "coupled" the two are the better your aerobic endurance. Kinda important -- especially for long course triathletes.

When I first read about it in Joe Friel's book Going Long, he mentions 2-hour tests and I only did a one hour ride last night, but for that ride I tried to stay smack-dab in the middle of my Zone 1 heart rate, which I did. After the first 10 min were all over the show that is. The test was to see then what he power would do. The result: the power stayed pretty constant at around 200 watts -- also low Zone 1 for power. This, then, translates into a decoupling of 1.15% as per WKO+. Apparently this is really good... Although I suspect that if I actually did a 2-hour test the power would start to drop off quite a bit at the same heart rate.

Anyway, here is a picture but unfortunately I cannot seem to get the proper horizontal lines like in the examples in the link above:

Anyway, I'll have to invest some time and RTFM and learn the software better to get proper use from it. 

My swim this morning left me again somewhat wanting. Not as bad as Tuesday and I did have a really good pull set (pulling is my strength) but still nothing to write home about. 

Speaking with my friend Lawrence (who is a really good swimmer) after the swim he mentioned that it is quite common that one gets worse when applying all the previously missing technique, before eventually getting better. 

Oh I hope he is right! 

That's all for now!