SkiErg pace chart: split, watts and finishing times

Most SkiErg training is prescribed in one unit and displayed in another. A coach says “hold 300 watts”; the monitor is showing you a 500m split. A programme says “2k at 5 seconds slower than test pace”; you need to know what that is in watts before you can hold it steady.

This is the whole conversion, in one table. If you would rather type a number than scan a column, the pace calculator does the same arithmetic interactively.

The table

Every row is a 500m split. Watts and the finishing times all follow from it.

How to read it

Three things in this table are worth more than the numbers themselves.

The watts column is not linear. Look at what a ten-second improvement costs. Going from 2:10 to 2:00 adds about 33 watts. Going from 1:40 to 1:30 adds about 70. Power scales with the cube of speed, so the same ten seconds costs you twice as much work at the fast end. This is the single most useful thing on the page: it explains why the last five seconds of a personal best are so much harder to find than the first five, and why comparing two athletes by seconds-improved flatters whoever started slower.

The 5000m column is a lie you tell yourself. It shows what happens if you hold that split for the entire piece. Almost nobody does. The gap between the time in this column and your actual 5k is your fade, and it is a training variable in its own right — usually a more informative one than your best 500.

Calories are power, not effort. The calorie column comes from Concept2’s own formula, which is a fixed function of watts plus a constant standing in for resting metabolism. It does not know your mass, your fitness or your heart rate. Two skiers holding 250 watts burn the same displayed calories and very different real ones.

The maths behind it

Concept2 publishes the power relation the PM5 uses. With pace in seconds per metre:

watts = 2.80 / pace³
pace  = ∛(2.80 / watts)

A 500m split is that pace multiplied by 500, so a 1:45 split is 105 seconds, or 0.21 seconds per metre, which is 2.80 / 0.21³ ≈ 302 watts.

The calorie figure is kcal/hr = (watts × 4 × 0.8604) + 300.

Both formulas come from Concept2’s own calculator page.

What the table cannot tell you

Whether two sessions are comparable. A 1:45 at drag factor 5 and a 1:45 at drag factor 9 are the same displayed number produced by two different tests. If you want this season to compare to last season, the drag factor has to be part of the record — what drag factor actually does covers why.

How you produced the pace. An average is an average. Two skiers can finish a 2000m at exactly 1:46.1 with one of them holding every stroke within a few watts and the other swinging between 350 and 500. The finishing times are identical; the training conclusions are opposite. That difference only shows up if something is recording each stroke.

Where it fell apart. The split column tells you the piece was slow. It does not tell you it was slow because the third 500 collapsed while the first and last were fine. That is usually the actual coaching conversation, and it is invisible in any table of averages.