Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
Even though I'm not the biggest fan of NP and TSS and understand how it can be broken, holding 1.01 for 3 plus hours is beyond even that realm. That FTP is certainly too low unless your PM was suddenly reading much too high on that day. 40 minutes in Z6 is...unlikely, seeing as how that's normally a zone you'd hold for 30-120 secs at a time (because it's very difficult).
To compare to your one ride, in the last 90 days (over 100 hours of riding), with multiple group rides and workouts, I've only accumulated 1 hour and 4 minutes of time in Z6.
That's what I'm trying to get across in this thread: optimal endurance training is not plunking along at a continuous long-sustainable pace. Not at all. This ride is what endurance training looks like. This is how it's done. Go as hard as you possibly can, recover, repeat endlessly. The standard quote is something like, "Endurance is between your ears." Short rides like this are done at a higher intensity to simulate what happens on a long ride but in a lot less time. No kidding it's "very difficult." That's the whole point. As we say, "If it weren't hard, we wouldn't be doing it." You could be training a lot harder.
I was taught on longer rides than this, with long climbs, to simply keep attacking the group, off the front until you can't and they catch you, sit in until you get your breathing back under control, attack again, repeat, repeat. On a short ride like this, the routine is to attack every little rise full gas. I did the 600w+ on the ride's one longer steep hill when I sprinted from the back and dropped everyone, then "recovered" at FTP for the rest of the hill which was shallower. Yes, that's exactly the opposite to what everyone says about "how to climb a hill." It's harder, yes. but this isn't racing, it's training. It's supposed to be hard. A couple of the faster riders did catch me before the top, but as I said, it's not racing.
This is pretty funny, really. What the heck am I doing? But this is how one gets to be fast on endurance rides. You just haven't trained specifically to do this, continuously except for one regretted winter, for 20 years. You had other priorities. The first group ride with these folks I ever went on was a double metric. They schooled me very quickly. At the mid-ride lunch stop, I cramped so badly that I slid under the table and laid on the floor. I was off the back and soloing at 16 for most of the second half, but I was hooked. I had no idea.
Strasser rode the 3000+ miles of RAAM at an average of 16.42 mph. That's on elapsed time, not moving time. He didn't do that by riding slowly. A RAAM rider I know said he attacked the first climb hard and was never seen again.
I have a Powertap SL 2.4, which I calibrate before every ride or workout. My FTP is, as I said, if anything too high. I certainly can't hold 160w for an hour. My 110% and 120% intervals seem just right: I'm panting and have trouble completing one set.
But as you said, the TSS calculation is much more interesting than assuming it's 3 hours at FTP.
Normalized Power is calculated using an algorithm that is a little complex, but in a nutshell takes into account the variance between a steady workout and a fluctuating workout. The resulting value is an attempt to better quantify the physiological “cost” of the harder “feel” of the variable effort.
Full explanation here:
https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/w...malized-power/
The point of having a TSS in TP is to create a CTL and TSB which track fitness and exhaustion as closely as possible. IME it works quite well. I had another Perfect Ride™.