This marks a debut in the Slowtwitch Bike Survey data sets. We've surveyed bike brands, wheel sizes, saddles, wheels, tires, aero bars, base bar styles, frame materials, seat angles, pedals, but we've never counted power meters.
It's becoming an increasingly important category now, because a lot of athletes in this race are choosing to use power meters on their bikes. This is an interesting phenomenon, because one school of thought argues that a power meter represents and irresistable temptation to those who feel they ought to hold a given power for 112 miles. But they do so at their own peril, since 280 watts in Kona is different than 280 watts at IM Lake Placid, or 280 watts on their home turf in Bend, or Duluth, or Atlanta, or Albany.
Others dispute that there's any peril in having a power meter in Kona, arguing that the experienced user of power knows to consider heat and humidity, and the introduction of relevant information to his Kona experience is a good thing, and never a bad thing.
Though opinions might vary, certainly the use of power meters is on the increase here. Powertap leads the field with 47. This is so even though you must use Powertap's hub, and if you're going to use a race wheel in Kona -- and most people do -- then you've got to have your Powertap hub built into that race wheel.
That's not a big problem, I did this myself, by sending my Power tap hub to Hed and having an Alps tubular rim laced up around it. Worked like a charm. Still, it limits the availability of rear race wheels you might select. You can't built this hub into a Hed3, for example. But I can see no reason you can't build it into a Zipp deep dish rim, and that's the favored wheel in Kona.
The second most popular power meter is the SRM, and it's the unit most likely to be used by the top pros, though we come to this opinion only through casual observation. Three of the athletes in the front chasing group in Kona this year -- Cam Brown, Faris Al Sultan, and Luke Bell -- not only rode SRMs, but had their data wirelessly uploaded to a server, and the data was presented to onlookers around the world real time, via the 2peak.com website. There were 38 total SRM users in the field.
The only other power meter we surveyed was the Ergomo, and there were 15 of these in the race.
Yes, there is one other power meter in use, made by Polar, but our surveyor didn't or couldn't identify these. Undoubtedly there were Polars in the race, and we'll have to wait until next year to add them to the data we'll archive and compare from year to year.
