Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
So, what, like in a race or something? How many dozens of examples would you like?
Here's a hard race. Note that my powermeter, ftp, and zones were was all pretty accurate. Zone 6 was 25 minutes and 6 seconds.
Another of my longest and hardest races. Z6 = 19 minutes and 39 secoThese were both from national championship races, so suffice to say I was "slaughtered" in ways that I'm not typically slaughtered.
But hey, maybe you just train so much harder.
Nice! Way to go! I don't understand the issue. That was a good example of a similar workout, only ~45' longer and a little less time in Z6 than I had, but not a terribly different set of percentages. It's interesting that you also had a lot of time in Z1. I wondered about that in the case of races. I wonder what your TSS in TP would have been, which I believe is the complaint, not really the amount of Z6 I had, which as we see, is not that different. We had different goals - yours was to try to win the race or at least podium, mine and that of my other riders was to accumulate as much high end stress as possible in the distance available, hence the Z1 time I had and how little of the others between there and Z6.
These competitive rides I've been doing almost every Sunday for 20 years are race simulations, except that if one of us drops the group, we soft pedal so we can do it again, except it'll probably be someone else who goes and the challenge will be to hold their wheel if we can. So there's no winner, just trying to leave it all on the road. Our motto: "We believe in safe and cooperative riding," cooperating to trash each other. That we had more surging that did you could have been the dynamic or the terrain. This particular ride had so much surging because it was so short. My goal is for it to be hard just to walk when I get off the bike, and this wasn't much time to get to that point, though it worked about perfectly. Longer rides don't look like this: the last 10 hour ride I did had an IF of .73, 543 TSS.
I don't get to do these competitive rides as often as I used to since I take the tandem on them now. The ability to have a bit of competition depends on what other tandems show up. It's not quite the same, but I do get a good workout on the tandem anyway, good enough to do what I want to do on my single, as you saw.
I can't do this on my own, can't get that level of stress, which I think is quite normal. My workout structure follows a pattern which was discussed in another thread where I think you were present. The idea is to accumulate a lot of stress at the start of the week and then gradually get rid of it over the week so that one starts the next week with somewhere around zero for a TSB. Tuesday, my TSB is usually -20-30.