Looking at Watts and Weighted Avg Power

Now that I've ridden my regular lunch route a couple of times, I decided to look at my data. Here is a chart with the average watts, weighted avg power (WAP) watts, elapsed time in seconds and elapsed time in hr:min:ss.

	avg watts	WAP watts	time secs	hr:min:ss
5/21/2014	180	198	3722	1:02:22
5/20/2014	174	192	3877	1:04:37
5/12/2014	189	216	3650	1:00:50
5/5/2014	183	214	3793	1:03:13
4/11/2014	188	214	3687	1:01:27
4/10/2014	194	214	3703	1:01:43
4/8/2014	182	204	3795	1:03:15
4/6/2014	174	200	3946	1:05:46

So far my fastest time is 1:00:50 for an average of 189 watts or a WAP of 216. According to cyclemeter the wind that day was 10mph WSW. The day with the highest avg watts was 194, WAP of 214 and wind of 22mph SW.

If I compare the time for tuesday and wednesday of this week, there's roughly a 2min difference. The wind on tuesday was 22 mph NW, and wed was 5 mph E. The thing that interests me is the relationship between watts and time. Alot of bike manufacturers throw around numbers claiming their new aero bike saves blah watts and gives you a blah second advantage.

In reality, riding in the real world things are constantly changing, so "watt saving" doesn't translate to actual seconds faster. The only sure fire gaurantee for going faster is getting fit, loosing weight and proper training. The data I have so far doesn't prove anything, but it is interesting to see how power varies. As I get more data for my lunch route, I can do more analysis to see the correlation between time and power.