How to make the perfect panel for your race

myWindsock’s new version, surface, allows you to customise the information panel on the right hand side of the user interface. While, of course, your account comes pre-installed with a large array of pre built panels focussing on many aspects of cycling including weather, aerodynamics, terrain and more – each rider is different and this blog will focus on how to go about setting up your own panels.

Panel Basics

This is a screengrab of the right hand side of the screen on desktop with the Ironman 70.3 World Championships course pre loaded into myWindsock. By clicking the three dots on the right hand side you’re able to see a drop down menu which contains the panel you’re in, the ability to edit it and an option for panel library. Next to the three dots, there’s a a star, which allows you to input a text based description of what you want and myWindsock will automatically adjust the panel based on what you want.

The pre loaded Panel Library comes with six options…

  1. Default – A broad overview of the course.
  2. Performance Deep Dive – Focussing on effort and power delivery.
  3. Wind Analysis – This is self explanatory.
  4. Course and Terrain – Focusing on the elevation and physical aspects of the course.
  5. Race Plan – A panel designed for race preparation
  6. Aerodynamics and CdA – Focussed on aerodynamic analysis

Users are also able to update the pre loaded panels, as well as design their own from scratch. Today, we’ll focus on editing the Race Plan panel to go from the default panel to one more focussed on triathlon.

Editing a Panel

There are two ways to edit a panel, the option from the drop down menu or the text input option.

The data panel can be customised with a prompt.

In order to decide what to prompt the panel we need to decide what we want to know in order to prepare for the race. Preparing for a triathlon is a unique challenge as we need to carry a lot, it’s not actually a maximal effort and we need to get the gearing correct. It’s also, in the case of professional racing, a “semi drafting” race where some advantage is to be gained by being among a group of riders even if they must stay 20m apart. This means that energy investment is less linear than during a pure time trial as energy applied at seemingly non optimal points in the course might actually make sense in the context of non-draft triathlon.

We can use the Panel Index to see what’s currently contained in the Race Plan. With this, we can see what’s currently contained in the plan and decide what we want to delete or add. The first thing we’ll do is prompt the text box to delete the “W’ Balance Risk” plot as I don’t have up to date critical power information for this race – just a rough idea of the power I could hold, so we’ll delete this as it provides a false precision for the pacing plan in my specific case.
We can ask myWindsock to delete the panel for us in natural language like this. The new panel index now contains four charts.

How many charts is too many?

For a course that’s 90km with mountains, it’s possible to summarise all the pacing and race preparation information between 5 and 10 charts. The exact charts you feel you need prepared is left for the user.

The first thing we will do is add two charts, one which has an elevation profile and a second which shows us the distribution of gradients during the ride.

Our new Panel Index looks like this. We can now go onto looking at the Pacing Strategy Section.

Editing Panels is a new feature on myWindsock, to check out this forecast click here.