About the Author

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I am Bob Fugett.

When it comes to training with power meters, I know exactly what I'm talking about, so save time, skip the rest of this page, and jump directly to the practical text.

Ok, you were warned.

In the Introduction to this book, I flatly stated that I do not have any of the standard credentials usually considered prerequisite for authoring a work such as this one.

However, I am constantly shocked just how little knowledge people in cycling sport have about the most basic fundamentals of progressive athletic training.

Therefore, in trying to figure out why so much tried and true training knowledge is beyond the grasp of so many riders, I realized I do have some rather odd and not inconsequential credentials—even without certification.

What most forcefully focused my attention on the widespread lack of training knowledge in the cycling industry is the continued difficulty trying to explain Watts to people who do not have a power meter.

The most obvious logical comparisons are to weight training, but I find few of even the racers I know (never mind the even fewer general riders) have ever lifted weights.

I always thought everybody with the slightest interest in athletics has lifted weights (and seriously) at some point in their life.

I was wrong, so I started thinking about it.

"Why don't people know this stuff? What made me think all this was just general knowledge?"

Interesting story.

On reviewing the situation I realized that my Junior High, High School, and College years were actually spent in very robust ground breaking athletic programs in which I came into contact with some of the best coaches and teachers of their day.

Not only did those teachers and coaches demonstrate solid concepts to me, they also directed me to great resources for further study on my own.

To begin with, I was born and raised in a tiny Midwest town smack in the middle of Ohio, which is to say in the very center of the football universe.

Our High School football team was the long standing regional champions and could only be challenged by teams from the largest cities.

While my father never allowed me to play on the football team, I did get to participate in related training programs plus sandlot football which was well under my father's radar.

Suffice it to say, in that tiny Midwest town athletics were just a way of life with competition at the heart of it.

That is where I learned to lift weights.

The person who taught me the basics of weight training was the person who put together that winning football program, and the orientation he gave me was impeccable.

So now I have to drop names.

My first weight training coach was Coach Bowlus, and he had won his position (developing our high school's winning football program) by beating out Woody Hayes for the opportunity.

That is right, you might not know the name Bowlus, but if you know anything about football you have heard of Woody Hayes who (after losing the interview competition at our high school) went on to work at Ohio State, etc, etc.

Still, if the name Woody Hayes is too far back in history for you, you might know the name of somebody else who went through the same program that I did but a few years earlier.

He is currently defensive coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dick Lebeau... went to my high school, doesn't know me from a turnip green.

One of the organized team sports that I was allowed to take part in was Track and Field.

It was just called track, and it was primarily used as spring training for the football team (an adjunct to the summer program of bailing and stacking hay for the local farmers), so nobody took track seriously at all.

That is until a young coach, Elvin King, showed up for his first teaching job my junior year of high school.

Coach King had a strong interest in running and decided to make it real.

He fashioned a great plan where we would run every road in town and keep a record of our progress by coloring roads completed on a wall map.

The goal was to get everybody under a 6:00 minute mile by season's end.

An under 6:00 minute mile seemed like madness at the time, but by the end of that year everybody in the program was under 5:00.

Another thing Coach King did was hand me Franz Stampfl's seminal book "On Running."

To the amazement of all my other teachers, I immediately left the back of study hall (where I always spent my time whistling water drop mimicries to drive the hall monitor bonkers looking for the leak), and moved up into the middle of the room where I buried my head in the running book.

It got to the point where I had to be prompted when the changing bell sounded.

I have never heard one single solitary thing about strength, endurance, and performance training that was not covered perfectly well in Stampfl's book which was written in 1955.

Every time I get excited hearing about something new, it always turns out to be mere marketing charlatanry, or a rehash of the concepts in Stampfl's book which were not all his own ideas anyway.

He had coached Roger Bannister to the first sub-4 minute mile, and his book got me to college.

While I'm on a roll with name dropping, it must be mentioned that the person who recruited me for collegiate Cross Country and Track was Coach Bill Wall.

Years later Bill would put together the first Olympic basketball Dream Team...which is of course where the term Dream Team originated.

I spent most of my college years as a P.E. Minor studying athletics—often in classes of no more than a half-dozen students which were instructed by Coach Wall himself.

At one point during that time I was called on to teach a College P.E. class in Tennis and Handball.

That required me visiting the library the night before class to review the literature then grabbing somebody during class (who actually could play) to demonstrate what I had just read about.

My ability to do that was supported by such things as having been captain of my high-school tumbling team (not an organized sport, just half time shows during basketball games), and a wealth of outside activities now considered X-games (we built our own skateboards because there was no such commercial product), and that also allowed me to pick up pole vaulting my freshman year at college to wow the coaches by moving up 6 inches every meet throughout the year.

I was told, "That is amazing. Pole vaulters always jump the moon or don't qualify. I've never seen such constant steady improvement."

Just like at my high school, cross country and track were also not a main sport at my college, so we who competed were in charge of our own training which basically meant warming up with the wrestling team, doing our ten mile loop or intervals, then cooling down while acting as bodies for the soccer team's practice—we were placed in the middle of the field and told to run back and forth goal to goal while trying to steal the ball again and again.

Just to give us a title they called us Fullbacks but told us to be on every play at both goals and everywhere in between.

It kept us running.

In summary, it was a trial by fire that accustomed me to a certain level of care and attention to the details of athletic performance.

Later I channeled all that knowledge into music while fine tuning my self-discipline, but that is another story despite the legend (expanded) and my recycling of that process back into cycling sport.

In any case, as an early adopter of power meters trying to have a logical discussion about Watts, I found the majority of the riders around me had not a clue about the most rudimentary basics of athletic training techniques, and I was a little befuddled at first.

On reflection I now get it and maybe can help.

Despite the fact that the text above is only the briefest outline of my life in athletics, I still hope you only read the first couple paragraphs before moving on to the meat of this book.

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