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Lionel Sanders’ power files from Ironman 70.3 Oceanside

Breaking down the most interesting power data facts from Lionel Sanders' ride at Ironman 70.3 Oceanside.

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TrainingPeaks  has released Lionel Sanders’ power data from his recent win at Ironman 70.3 Oceanside. In addition to providing details from this year’s race, the site has also offered a comparison to his numbers last year, when he also won.

Here we’ve summarized the most interesting points from the power analysis:

He averaged approximately the same power on the bike in 2016 and 2017:

Sanders’ power didn’t differ too much between the two years, even though he had a dramatically different position on the bike after a late 2016 trip to the velodrome with Garneau and Alphamantis. According to the article, “In 2016 he averaged 352 watts for a bike split of 2:07:47 while in 2017 he averaged 354 watts for a 2:05:42. On roughly the same power he took more than two minutes off his split. This could be due to weather, but when we break down the course we can see that the majority of it is due to the bike position changes…”

He changed his game plan on the bike after learning how small his deficit was after the swim:

Sanders had less than three minutes down to Jan Frodeno coming into T1, thanks to the best swim of his career. When he learned how much time he had behind the leaders, he decided not to hammer the first miles of the bike as hard as he had planned to initially.

The first 10 miles of the ride he rode at a normalized power of 370 watts and an average power of 356 watts which was only one watt higher than his entire average for the whole bike leg. You can view the power file to his entire ride here.

Climb numbers:

Sanders’ challenged himself to ride in the big chain ring for the two significant climbs of the course. For for .8-mile, 5.3% gradient climb, he comfortably managed and then did so again for the bigger hill — he pushed 422 watts (5.57 W/kg) at 76 RPM for three minutes to conquer it.