The first rider is a 6'1 male, ~190lbs, 1500w Pmax, 21kJ FRC. We'll call him Winston. It was his first cyclocross season and no big goal races, so we worked on his technical abilities to help with crits in 2016 as well as his steady state power, which would be a limiting factor for him in many races as he moves through the categories. PD curve:
The other is a 5'11 female, ~130lbs, 730w Pmax, 11kJ FRC. Let's call her Linda. Her big goal is winning collegiate nationals, which is tomorrow. PD curve:
Since these PD curves show the male as a decent all-rounder and the female as having a slightly better steady state power than high end power, I should qualify this and say these are best all time efforts. Winston is a former lifter and has lot of natural power, so during cross (he only did September and October) we worked a lot on his steady state riding so he wouldn't so heavily rely on his anaerobic reserves during racing. Linda has very good abilities riding steady state, so we worked on her ability to accelerate and recover as well as her anaerobic power.
It'd take too many graphs to make the next point about cadence, so I'll just tell you. Winston naturally pedals at a low cadence, and his ability to produce large torque puts him at an advantage in a cyclocross corner where the speed delta into and out of corners is large and even if you shift down twice, you're still accelerating from 75rpm. This also takes a lot of core strength, which is another thing Winston has thanks to his lifting days. We didn't do a lot of drills to increase his strength on the bike, so a lot of his targeted workouts were steady state to get him more used to putting out power for 40 minutes as well as getting him used to the body English of riding off road. A usual interval workout was 45' tempo, or 3x15' sweet spot with accelerations every so often. A technical workout would be classic 30/30/30/30s (30" sprint, 30" rest, dismount and 30" run, remount and 30" rest), a few hours of riding singletrack, or a recovery day with lots of cornering.
There aren't a lot of graphs that show an improvement in a rider's technical abilities, and since Winston's power numbers stayed steady, what I can show you is an improvement in points: first couple races were low 500s to high 400s, and his last race was low 400s (from crossresults.com). A good and steady improvement for a first time cross racer, and already with 4 upgrade points. Regardless, this is the weekly MMP (highest average power for specified time) for his two months of cross.
Linda's much more of a high cadence rider, a practical all rounder in terms of build and abilities. A lot of her steady state workouts on the road show her pedaling at 95-105rpm, but in cross races the average was about 80, and it took her a few seconds out of corners to get up to speed. She's quite thin as well, and so doesn't have large muscular power or FRC to dig deep continuously, but her steady state power and technical abilities serve her very well and allow her to ride consistently throughout a race, especially on longer rhythm sections. Because a lot of cross is coming out of corners at low cadence, she was losing some time. Most of her drills were a combination of accelerating from low cadence, from steady state, and pure anaerobic power. An interval workout she did frequently was low-ish cadence threshold intervals with periodic accelerations. There were many anaerobic power workouts, from 30" intervals to repeated 15"-2' intervals with varying amounts of rest.
To give you an idea of how effective this approach was, here is a quadrant analysis from an early season race from Linda, before I started working with her. Most of the scatter is relatively low torque and high cadence, but there is still a very large amount of high torque, low cadence.
Next is a late season race. You can see how the cluster shifts up and to the left. She's still doing a lot of high cadence, low torque pedaling because it's what she does naturally, but the low cadence, high torque efforts are more repeatable and common.
Another thing Linda's long season allowed us to do was bring her to a nice sharp peak for collegiate nationals tomorrow. The following is the graph of her build to nationals.
What this graph doesn't show is how hard she worked through late November. Those power numbers went up, but she was feeling a whole lot of fatigue. Linda is a great communicator, and I regularly adjusted her workouts to include less volume and intensity as the fatigue went up, so we were able to keep her riding the edge of functional overreaching without burning her out. Even better was that we knew she would have almost an entire month to rest and maintain fitness between her last regional race and nationals. During this time she rested, did some low intensity, high volume road riding, and did the absolute minimum amount of high intensity intervals, just to keep the legs sharp. We can see her hitting her best power numbers of the season the week before the holiday. When I took this screen cap I didn't have her files after Christmas, but she's been maintaining well and becoming fresher every day.
Something you may notice about the MMP graphs is the 5" power getting progressively lower through both riders' seasons. This is something I see a lot, but it's not cause for concern. It reflects the fatigue that cyclocross has on a rider, especially with regular racing and trying to hit those high numbers repeatedly. Being able to hit that peak at the end of a race matters a lot in road sprinting, where freshness matters. But like Adam Myerson says, there are no sprinters at the end of a cross race. It's the combination of technical riding, accelerating repeatedly, and being able to maintain a high pace between those hard efforts that makes a fast cross racer.
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