Measure Everything: How Saris + The Pro’s Closet Nails the Details to Maximize Performance - Part I: eRacing Environment
Cycling is a race of numbers. Gradients, temperatures, humidity, altitudes, TSS, pounds per square inch, beats per minute, watts, rolling resistance, CdA — the list goes on and on. Understanding these numbers and how to use them can give an athlete considerable advantages where the rubber meets the road. Or for Saris + The Pro’s Closet, where the pixels hit the virtual tarmac.
Saris + The Pro’s Closet (STPC) is a team of passionate and elite cyclists racing their bikes virtually through eRacing on platforms such as Zwift. While the burgeoning sport came to light when nearly all sports were halted due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, STPC has been doing this for years. STPC is consistently atop the world rankings, and is one of the top teams in Zwift’s Pro / Am Premier Division events.
The team credits their many successes to a few things: keeping their racing and training fun, maintaining a tight-knit and cohesive team, and nailing the details! The details are where cycling is at its most complicated. If cycling is a race of numbers, STPC measures everything.
eRacing Environment
Cyclists have been slow to embrace indoor training and racing. What is the recipe for how to hate indoor riding? Attach bike to dust-covered wheel-on trainer, stare at a wall, aim a small fan that will blow room temperature, humid air at you and pedal. Sometimes, the simplest solution isn’t the best solution. While adding an ingredient like Zwift to that recipe may slightly improve the experience, it was early on that the STPC team discovered the one crucial component that played a huge role in their enjoyment of riding indoors: environment.
Matt’s multi-fan setup
Matt Gardiner, a co-founder of STPC, credits the purchase of his first blower fan with shifting his perspective on eSports. “I remember early on in 2016 doing races on Zwift and getting absolutely crushed, sweating buckets and going cross-eyed in each event. I was getting really good workouts in, but I wasn’t performing very well. I stumbled upon a forum talking about fans for indoor training, and changed my training and racing forever. I purchased a construction-grade blower fan frequently used for drying paint or wet carpets. At the time I was doing FTP tests monthly, and I remember going from a 310W FTP to a 325W FTP with the first test after buying the fan. I immediately ordered a second fan!”
Incredibly cheap humidity & temperature monitor
This realization of how cooling impacts his indoor riding drove Matt to measure the environment he races in even more; airflow is important, but so too are temperature and humidity. “Even with the fans going full blast, after an hour, there was a pool of sweat on the floor and the air was heavy and nearly 100% humidity.” This prompted the next and most important pain cave upgrade for Matt: a dehumidifier.
Running the dehumidifier full blast while riding was the final piece to the indoor environmental puzzle for Matt. “I’m fortunate that I ride in an unfinished basement and have access to a storm drain. This allows me to let the dehumidifier drain continuously. It pulls the moisture from the air as the fans evaporate my sweat into the room, keeping the temperature and humidity constant while I train.” The ability to control humidity means you can regulate your sweat rate much more easily. Limiting fluid loss enables you to ride harder and longer indoors; making 2 to 3 hour rides and races on Zwift less exhausting.
That sounds so simple (and costly) on paper: buy a humidifier, strong fans, portable A/C and get faster! But what about proving that there’s a benefit? Where do you start in measuring the impact of your environment on performance?
Understanding Environmental Impacts on Performance
When you look at training or environmental data, any single metric pulled out of context and analyzed on its own is meaningless; watts from your power meter without heart rate makes it impossible to discern whether cardiovascular improvements have been made in training, a PR on a Strava KOM without factoring in wind speed or direction makes it impossible to determine if the PR was your aerodynamics, power output, or a friendly assist from mother nature.
Contextual data considered together when analyzing your training allows you to determine more confidently what changes have occurred and how those changes affect performance. Two critical metrics most affected by temperature, humidity, and air movement are power and heart rate.
For Matt, when he purchased his first blower fan and had an FTP boost from 310W to 325W, did his heart rate also increase from test #1 to test #2? If it did, the fan might have been less help than he realized — meaning he simply pushed harder in test #2 — but the fan may have enabled him to push harder, making the perceived effort lower. If Matt had noted the rate of perceived exertion (something he does now for all his training, thanks to Polar Flow) for each test, he would have a better answer!
Polar’s RPE Scale
So to answer the question: Where do you start in measuring the impact of your environment on performance? The answer is: measure everything.
Accurate, Complete Data Collection
Any data set becomes increasingly more compelling and meaningful as the data grow. Trends become clearer, relationships emerge, and your ability to use the information to make reliable predictions improves. When a set of data is incomplete, it makes it harder to draw conclusions about what you want to measure. So cast a wide net — you’ll only improve your ability to catch what you want! Just be sure you can reply in the data you’re gathering.
Accuracy is everything. If you’re not able to trust the data, you might as well not collect it. In the case of eRacing, Saris + The Pro’s Closet relies on Polar’s best-in-class heart rate measurement technology to ensure every beat is accounted for, both on and off the bike. The team also relies on the consistent and accurate power data from the Saris H3 smart trainer. Being able to reply on the data is critical when training and racing at any level, and the team have invested time and energy in exhaustive testing prior to settling on what they’ve determined is the best race machine: the Saris H3. A trainer robust enough to handle the demands STPC places on it, day in and day out, only reinforces their commitment to nailing the details.
Putting it to Practice
You might be thinking, “That’s great — STPC uses data to analyze and improve their performance, but how can I do the same?” The answer is pretty simple: just start!
If you’re curious about how your training environment may be affecting your training, pick up a cheap humidity/temperature gauge and start tracking both at the start of rides and end of rides through a Google Sheet or in your training journal — whatever you’ll actually use. Can you put out more wattage at a lower heart rate when humidity is 50% compared to 80%? Is there such a thing as “too many fans”? Saris + The Pro’s Closet also encourages members of the community to leverage the team as a resource.
Whatever it is you want to learn more about or improve upon: what gets measured, gets managed. So start measuring!
Stay tuned for Measure Everything: Parts II & III, where we’ll dive data both off and on the bike!