Last night, our friend Dirk Friel came to RM and personally gave the team the tutorial on how to use the TraningPeaks and CyclingPeaks software. This is stunning as a bunch of chumps liek us were getting the same touch that ProTour teams like Astana Predictor-Lotto and T-Mobile get from Dirk directly. Training peaks was a sponsor in 04/05 and now back as a prime sponsor for 07 and will be emblazoned on our sides like you see here in our old 04 uni's.

The tutorials went great and his walk through of how ProTour teams are really engaged these days with TrainingPeaks was awesome to listen to. Interestingly, as most teams are pushing towards a complete no-doping policy, the side benefits of having all that data (aside from super fit athletes) is data to fall back on to 'prove' rider workloads...essentially to validate teh cleanliness of the squad and that their performances are very real and not medicinal. So, TrainingPeaks is sort of like the Sarbanes Oxley of the athletic world! Maybe keeping ProTour teams out of Enron-like equivilents of doping versus dismal financial ethics.

There are TONS of resources on the TrainingPeaks site in addition to distractions like fairly intimate pictures of Dirk's experience with the big teams. This one of Dirk offering Lance a bag of Doritos from the Predictor-Lotto car is hilarious.
More impressive is visibility into real data from guys like Mario Aerts. Bringing up Mario's *.WKO data file in CyclingPeaks is...well...humbling. It's not often that you see a human push 300+ watts for 25 minutes right there in technicolor.

So, we're psyched to be working with Dirk and training peaks again and try to be more competitive with all this 'data'.