Riding to a power number will lose you the race on a climb

The meter tells you what you are producing and nothing about the rider next to you, who decides the race.

A climb, twenty minutes, six riders. Yours goes on the front and the number on your stem says you are three watts above your ceiling. You look down. That glance has already cost you.

Power meters transformed training, and I would not give one up. For structured intervals, for pacing a time trial, for tracking whether a winter block did anything, they are the most useful tool cycling has acquired in fifty years. In a road race they are frequently a liability, and I do not think that is a controversial position among people who race, only among people who train.

The reason is that road racing is decided by the size of the gap you can open and defend, and the cost of an attack is heavily nonlinear. Above your threshold you are spending from a finite reserve, sometimes described as W prime, and it is a bucket rather than a rate. You can empty it in ninety seconds or dribble it away in eight minutes of riding just slightly too hard, and the racing question is always whether the move in front of you is worth the withdrawal. That calculation depends on the road ahead, on how many riders will chase, on whether the descent afterwards lets you recover, and on whether the man opening the gap can actually stay away. None of that is on the head unit.

Worse, the number invites obedience. A rider who has been told his ceiling is three hundred and eighty watts will sit up when the display reads four hundred and ten, and in that moment he is not making a tactical decision, he is deferring to an instrument that knows nothing about the race. The reserve exists precisely to be overdrawn at the right moment. If you never overdraw it you have carried a resource around all afternoon and brought it home unused.

The compromise most good riders reach is to hide the number. Blank screen during the race, full file afterwards. Race on sensation and on what the wheels in front are doing, then let the data explain what happened once it cannot make the decision for you.

Train with the meter. Race with your eyes.

The rider who wins is rarely the one with the best file. Very often it is the one who spent everything at exactly the moment the file will later describe as reckless.