Crank arm based meters? There are numerous issues I’ve encountered with these types of power meters for MTB. Lots of erroneous power spikes especially if you are a left foot forward biased descender.
Spider based meters (like Quarq and P2M) have been rock solid in my experience and I have no reservations recommending them for mtb racing.
Not so sure about lots of spikes… I will get one, but mostly just one random one in a ride, but then again mine isn’t in the arm, but the spindle yet is only one-sided.
I haven’t heard of people having issues with the spindle based ones. Just the crank arm ones (like Stages).
My Stages was beyond horrible with power spikes.
I usually only get like one power spike and that gets cleared in the data it seems. I’m weaker in my left leg and I’m also a left foot forward biased descender.
Using either Stages or 4iiii crank-based power meters.
Thought I’d share my zone distribution from my local Wednesday night XC race. It was a very punch course and I was giving it maximum beans. What surprised me was nearly 45% of race was z5 or over. Xalibu this Saturday me thinks.
Xalibu today for me lol. Zone distribution like that makes me feel like I really need to work on the higher end a lot lot more. Rarely does my power profile look like that for XC races here in the Northeast.
Thank you so much for sharing!
By looking at a lot of professional riders and riders with an exceptionally high FTP I’m getting the feeling that they have a higher time spent in Z6 than in Z7. Whereas for us with a lower FTP a lot more time is distributed as a upside-down-bell-curve. I’m curious to why that might be.
I’ve started to wonder if it would be better to do longer VO2 / threshold intervals in between races as its the sustained L4 efforts that aren’t getting any direct training. On the flip side I’m in speciality phase (so not trying to grow ftp) and racing weekly, so maybe its just about making all workouts as event specific as possible?
I won my Cat 2 XCO race couple weeks ago by a bit of a margin and below were my power distributions from my Quarq. I wasn’t pushed as much on the second lap as I opened up a gap and finished nearly 2 mins ahead of second place. If the race was more closely contested, my power profile may be different. All that being said, it appears I was either pedaling easy or hard, but not a whole lot in that SS or Threshold zone. Which is great since my weakness, though apparently not a limiter, are those longer steady efforts.
Surely a strong threshold as well as pushing up your VO2 power increases the power at which you recover, so although not a limiter (for you) clearly it’s helping a lot.
From the research article posted by @sryke
The high level riders studied spend just under 20% of their time coasting, about 30 percent of their time below LT1, about 13% of their time in the middle zone between LT1 and LT2, about 9.4% of their time between LT2 and Max aerobic power (MAP), and 28% of their time above MAP. That is a brutal distribution, so when doing a WC style XCO, those guys are REALLY on the gas, but almost none of it is sustained, the majority of the time they are 5-10s of that high power, so any of the microbursts or the other over/under workouts like Xalibu and Richardson are quite specific to off road events.
Surely looks like the Bell-curve is turned upside-down for the high-level riders as well.
Looking at Nino Schurters power profile it looks the same.
from the latest race at Albstadt. Hard, very hard.
Here are some of my numbers from Albstadt. Keep in mind that this is off road, in muddy and slippery conditions. But thought you would like to see it anyway… - NP 368W, race time 1h25m - Start to the first descent 2:41- NP 531W
Saw that. Doesn’t say much except that he and everyone else on that level are monsters, if you don’t check out his Strava Zone-distribution-profile. 
