A lot has happened since my last blog. In short:

Proffesional bike fitting
New crank length
Move to sunny southern California

I was off the PCs for about 3-4 weeks from the end of January to nearly the end of February partly due to knee injury and partly for other reasons. My training on the PCs has since resumed and has ramped up in the last two weeks once again.

I was happy to find that I had maintained a decent amount of strength and form as I resumed my power cranking recently. In the last two weeks I have made the PCs are large part of my training schedule once again and once again I have noticed nearly immediate gains in my strength while riding standard cranks.

With the locking arms, I feel i am fully able to benefit from the PCs as I can more accurately control my level of fatigue while riding. I can train enough on the PCs to reap the benefits without becoming too tired, and I can still log lots of miles(24hr racer) at the same time.

I have also begun to use a HR monitor recently. I'm still figuring out what's what, but something I've definitely noted is that my HR while riding seems to be quite low compared to a lot of the people i ride with. 176bpm is the highest I've been able to raise my HR and i was shaking after the effort, it was all out.

When i used to train with a HR monitor, I generally hovered around 160bpm during sustained training and could jump to around 200bpm in all out efforts. Now, my HR stays around 140bpm or lower even though I'm at the same percieved level of exertion as when it used to be 160bpm.

Talk about a huge difference! I am sure the PCs have a lot to do with this change. It'll be interesting to see if my HR continues to fall. Any thoughts?