How do people deal with the power differences on the trainer vs. outdoors?
Some say that the power difference is a myth, but for me (and many others) its 7-8% less. I judge my weekly performance on 'time over tempo' which is the added time of z3, z4, z5, etc... Outdoors anything over 200 watts (if your ftp is 270....mine is uh 450) but with indoor variation that's 185w (z3+) and a 250 FTP. If I hit over 4 hours over z3 that's good, 6 hours is the goal.
This all sounds petty but yesterday I did almost an hour at 'trainer' threshold, but since it was on a trainer it was 7% less and I lose about 25 minutes of threshold work, and some z3 drops to z2. My legs don't really tell a difference but when I review my power data for a week or month its not really telling me how things actually went. My 'time over tempo' may show 4 hours when its actually 5.