Carbonfiberboy 

Seriously? On a recent 90 mile ride, my NP was 229. My FTP is somewhere around 190. Experience starts when you begin. I know nothing about Wahoo. You could query them and/or TP.

newduguy

Your numbers don't sound right....you held an IF of 1.2 for several hours? Typically I only see that high of IF when I am doing sprints home from work and break the NP algorithm (105 TSS for 40 minute ride)

redlude97

What was your avg power for that ride? Something is off

Carbonfiberboy 

134w. Seemed odd to me, too. I did three long breaks in rolling terrain, my fave, put minutes on the group, also took it easy in the back. Got a little exercise . Best ride I had all year. Felt 10 years younger. I could go. 5500'.

rubiksoval

Your numbers are way messed up. Either tons of data spikes or way underestimated FTP or something.

OBoile

What others have said. You should be only be able to do 190 NP for about an hour if your FTP is 229. Doing 40 watts more for several hours just doesn't make sense. My FTP is somewhere around 250 and a similar length ride at 215 NP absolutely destroyed me.

gregf83 

As others have mentioned, those numbers don't add up. If you're using a Garmin for recording power you need to ensure you are recording data at 1 Sec intervals and including zeros for avg power and NP to make sense. The relevant settings are:

Settings -> System -> Data Recording -> Power Averaging: Include Zeros
Settings -> System -> Data Recording -> Recording Interval: 1 Sec
Settings -> System -> Data Recording -> Cadence Averaging: Do Not Include Zeros

Suspect you have Power Averaging set to "Do not include zeros" which will artificially inflate power numbers. Oddly, I believe this is actually the default setting.

Carbonfiberboy 

I get it. Beats me. Haven't seen anything like that since. As everyone says, something's messed up. Sorry 'bout that.

Carbonfiberboy 

Thanks, I've changed all those. Very helpful.

Grotug

Well, I think Carbonfiberboy is right about me being overtrained. On Thursday I went out with the intent of going hard 2X on a 10 min rolling climb and I struggled to get out of zone 1 (though I did hit zone 4 for a bit toward the end of the climb: it's a good climb to do workouts on because it rolls in such a manner that I'm always at full gas on the final little ramp). Then on Friday I went out for my zone 2 ride and *really* struggled to get out of zone 1. My heart rate was also super reluctant to go into zone 2. I ended up spinning at 60 watts for like a half hour after I realized it was futile trying to get my legs to do anything interesting... that gave me enough recovery to do one decent effort up a short hill and spend the rest of the ride at zone 1 with a little zone 2. I averaged 120 watts and 105BPM HR.

So now I'm thinking the reason I hit the wall after 90 minutes on the previous ride on Friday was because my legs were fatigued enough that they could only do 90 minutes. The problem with my training program all summer is that I was doing the long enduro ride less than 24 hours after doing intervals and it finally caught up with me. So I took Sat/Sun off and will take Monday off, too. Hopefully I will be on form come Tuesday. Will be curious to see how I fair. I have a feeling I'll manage alright, but will be far from fresh.

asgelle

Look into the difference between overreaching and overtraining.

jadocs

Have you actually taken a FTP test yet? I remember when you got the PM you were relying on Strava estimates and history. I told you that you really needed to take one in that thread because Strava estimates were not accurate.

Paul Ko

I think 4~5 hours hard training per week is sufficient for amateur !

OBoile

No need to apologize. Really, I was piling on a bit... and I didn't mean to. I'm sorry if it felt like that.

Carbonfiberboy 

As asgelle intimates, it's overreaching, not overtraining, not by a long shot. Overreaching is actually good. It's a data point for you. Without knowing where that is and how it happened, you can't know your current limits and how to stay just below those. This is where having used TrainingPeaks premium or Strava Summit for quite a while really helps, because then you have numbers to look at as you plan your future training.

For now, 30' of Z1 every day for a few days would be good. What one does is to wait until one feels decent at Z1, then go out for a moderate ride, say 30' into it, hit a hill really hard, full gas, and see if your HR pops up normally and you have your usual power right from the start of the effort. When those things are true, you're good to go again. When they aren't true, you head back home at a moderate pace, tail between your legs and do more Z1 shorties.

Now you know you're not a superman after all. I know just how that feels.

Tulok

This is like a different language to me. But if I read that right, if you can pedal around easily. Then after a warmup, attack a hill or something like you want the KOM... if your heart rate quickly elevates and you feel good in the legs.. then that means you recovered long enough?

I don’t use any telemetry other than strava from my phone.

Carbonfiberboy 

Yup. And maybe sometimes too long. But coming back from way overreaching, when nothing you did could drive your HR up out of Z1, probably best to get completely recovered. One doesn't have to get that overreached to need good recovery time. Maybe you can hit Z3 just fine, but nothing above. That's overcooked also and needs to be recovered from. I do my regular training schedule and if I can't hit my numbers, I pedal home in Z2 and try again the next day, repeat until I've got it back. No harm done. Extra Z2 time is always good. This gets trickier if there's some group ride you have to do and you need to be recovered on that date. An extra day of rest does no great harm.

Grotug

So I took 3 days off; no biking at all. Today's Tuesday group ride was a practice for the race on Sept. 15th and the fast guys sent it. I wasn't sure how the ride was going to go and when the pace suddenly picked up I was attacking hard to bridge the gap to the fast guys (since the people I was riding with at that point didn't respond). I soon got dropped on the first set of hilly rollers. I felt decent, and my power was definitely back. It was disappointing to get shelled by the fast men so early in the ride, but encouraging to see good wattage throughout the ride. My HR was typical as well compared to most of my workouts this summer. I didn't take any caffeine for this ride (which wasn't intentional) and I didn't have beet juice either. I had some PBs in the power department, which isn't too surprising since the ride was full gas the whole time once we hit the first hilly rollers. New high average power for any ride: 174 watts (Strava had the average at 188 watts) compared to previous best on a shorter ride of 161 watts. My hour power for this ride was 196 watts, also a personal best (compared to second best of 178 watts).

The ride had some good carrots throughout. After I got dropped by the fast men, I hung on with a guy who was slightly stronger than me for most of the ride before getting dropped near the end of the course at which point some chasers picked me up and we worked together chasing a group in front of us. We were all quite evenly matched, though one guy proved to be a little stronger than the rest of us during the last stretch before the town sprint. It was good that I was picked up by people as strong as me; as such I was gunning at my limit the whole ride. Great fun.

Now the question is what will I do on Thursday and Friday? Tomorrow (Wed.) I will do a recovery ride. Thursday marks the start of the taper. I think Thurs I'll do a route with rolling hills and max 20 miles and pace myself; do what feels good; maybe only one hard effort? (as opposed to two or three?). I think for Friday I will do zone 2 and see how that feels and if I'm feeling good I'll stay in Zone 2 and discipline myself not to get excited... and also keep the ride a bit shorter (probably two hours). I'm afraid if I reduce intensity my lungs are gonna bother me on race day (they bothered me today; my right lung [the one that collapsed when I was 19] was hurting quite a bit while I was holding onto dear life (ie. the wheel in front of me) at one point in the ride. I guess best practice will be to keep up the intensity but have the amount of time at high intensity much less than normal?

I just hope to Betsy I can reach top form for the 15th of September.

Carbonfiberboy 

When I do endurance Z2 rides, I always gun it on a short hill or two. During a taper, the last week, I'll do Z1 with one or more 90" intervals. Yes, one has to maintain intensity, and the best way seems to make the intensity very high and very short to keep training load low. OTOH, Rodriguez, an American pro, did nothing but Z1, 20 hrs/week, for the last couple weeks before the Nationals, which he won.

Again and again, something like TrainingPeaks would have helped you. The whole idea, one might gather from the name, is to be able to program peaks into one's training.

Grotug

Soooo... I finally figured out how to sync my rides with my Training Peaks account. As soon as I did I immediately bought the premium for a year.

First thing I wanted to see was by best hour power, because on Tuesday I did basically a race practice of the course. I road hard, but I wouldn't say an all out effort, though there were times I was absolutely pushing it. I didn't take any beet juice or caffeine before this ride like I usually do. My average power for the hour and one minute where I was basically racing was 193 watts (there was a brief lull in the intensity when going through a town). My normalized power was 229.

Now on Friday I did a shortened endurance ride (hour and 40 min) and normalized power was 157 and I tried to stay in what I was guessing to be zone two power of 160 watts for the whole ride. My 20 min and 30 min power for that ride were both 160 watts, despite how very difficult it was for me to hold 160 watts. Normally when I ride I'm so used to going hard then taking it easy. I kept surging to 200 watts, if I backed off I'd find myself back down to 130 or 120. 160 was this very slippery place where my legs were very uncomfortable working. There were moments towards the end of the ride where I'd hover right around 160 watts for like 5 to 8 seconds and that was always super cool. My HR avg was 122, but grinding slow up the last climb at 55 to 70 cadence my HR dropped to 112 despite still holding about 180 watts. I thought that was pretty interesting. Kinda makes me wonder maybe I should be pedaling slower more often to lower my heart rate while maintaining power?

Today I did another zone 2 ride where I really tried to hold 160 watts. Again, it was difficult to keep the watts at 160 and not drop below or surge way over (it's much easier for me to keep steady at 190 watts than 160, even if I can't hold 190 for as long). Despite the difficulty, my average power for the ride was exactly 160 watts (one hour 12 minutes, with last 4 minutes very easy cool down) and NP was 167 watts. Average HR was 117 ("normalized" HR was 118 when removing the few times I had to stop pedaling due to down hills and last 4 minutes cool down). Interestingly, during the cool down (like 45 watts) my legs hurt more than they did at any other point in the ride. They started to hurt more towards the end of the ride: sore hamstrings, but hurt even more doing the 45 watt cool down. Very mysterious (this often happens when I am doing workouts at these lower efforts as compared to riding really really hard (my legs never hurt in this way after the ride). They have a "spongy" fatigued heaviness about them after really hard rides, but generally very little if any soreness.

This was an easier workout than Friday, my HR was lower, yet my avg power was slightly higher (was also shorter ride, tho).

Now the analysis: 1. My heart rate average wasn't even in zone 2 (115 to 127) yet my power was definitely at least zone 2; so does that mean my zone 2 HR now starts lower than 115BPM?
Second, let's say my effort on Tuesday was about a 9 out of 10. Can we extrapolate my FTP is some small percentage higher than 229? Maybe somewhere between 245 and 250?

TP shows me that since weak of Aug 12-18 to this week Sep 2-8 (I'm posting this on Sunday, the end of the week) my Fitness has gone from 121 to 111, my fatigue from 140 to 82, and my Form from -39 to 25. That seems pretty good to me! I have exactly one week to improve those numbers some more.

Grotug

I raced yesterday. My taper seemed to be pretty spot on. I slept well before the race, did some yoga at 4:30am, overloaded on beet juice powder and vitamin B complex two and a quarter hours before the race. Shot of espresso 45 minutes before. Had a drivetrain malfunction during warm up literally 7 minutes before the race (I had a new drivetrain installed 2 days before the race). No time to investigate it. Drivetrain malfunctioned again 15 min into the race and this time went into "crash mode" (I think this is a Di2 feature?) and, not having any idea of what "crash mode" is at the time, I sat on the side of the road trying to get the rear derailleur to down shift from the hardest gear with no luck. Finally gave up and decided to do the rest of the race in the hardest gear (front derailleur still shifted) so I rode with two speeds: hard and very hard. Still put out an avg 190 watts despite the handicap and ~45 cadence up the hills and my 60 min NP was 1 watt shy of my record set on Tuesday (! how the? !). Getting going again on the hill where the drivetrain failed the second time was a nightmare.

All season I've been chasing the fast guys. All season I've been building fatigue through training. All season I was not catching the fast guys. On race day I'm riding with the fast guys! Couldn't believe I held the first group over the first hill and into the second, putting down max 5 minute power and a time of 2:34 for the first hill (strava segment), 6 seconds faster than last year, and averaging 349 watts. My heart rate was flying. I hit a max heart rate two beats higher than my previous max earlier in the season and I held it for am minute up this climb! Perceived effort did not match actual effort thanks to the beet juice and race adrenaline.

I'll never know how long I would have held the front group in the race. But popular wisdom goes the group you are with at the top of the first hill is the group you will be in the rest of the race; this actually holds more true for the series of rising rollers that I malfunctioned on. Because it's only a 27 mile race it generally has a fast start and a hard attack on the first hill (and pretty much all the hills). Also, there is a big guy in our group rides who held the front group the whole time who I often found myself riding with after being dropped by the "super As" during the group ride. There is no reason for me to suspect that I would not have been able to hold his wheel the whole race if other wheels became difficult.

My race taper inadvertently started Aug 12th when I wasn't able to do my intervals on Thursday or endurance pace on Friday. Previous two weeks to that first taper week were 184 miles. First taper week was 145 miles. Second taper week 125 miles. Third 113 miles. Fourth 101 miles. Race week including the race, warm up and warm down 122 miles.

My ten day taper leading up to the race was short intervals on Thursday, half length enduro ride on Friday where I actually held zone 2 power (ow, my legs still not used to that). Sat off. Sun zone 2 power again (20 miles). Monday leg openers (only really went hard on the last of the set of 4). Tuesday was race simulation day on the group ride and I became a little nervous I was doing too much tapering and wanted to see where I was at so I pretty much sent it the whole ride and chased after two fast guys on the first hill (didn't catch them, though I felt great). Wed easy recovery spin. Thursday another recovery spin (slightly harder with zone 2 mixed in periodically). Friday off. Saturday leg openers. Sunday race day.

Interesting to note that the Tuesday one week prior to the 'race simulation Tuesday' I had best 5 sec power, best 1 min power, best 5 min power, best 10 min power, best 20 min power, best 60 min power, best 90 min power, and best 5 sec, 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min 60 min and 90 min heart rate for this season (I did not take anything before this ride and I don't think I even had caffeinated shot blocks). I had three days rest before that ride (no leg openers before it) and I did not feel great at all on that ride (a bit flat, given I hadn't ridden in three days). I guess how you feel and how you perform aren't always correlative!

On race simulation day my 20 min NP was 260 (compared to 244 on the record setting Tues) and my 1 hour NP was 242 compared to 233 on race sim day (and avg 1 hour power was only 2 watts higher on the record setting Tues). It's hard for me to believe my FTP may be as high as 260 watts, but unless there is something wrong with the NP calculations, that's what the numbers are indicating.

Overall, I was surprised I did as well as I did during the race--stuck with those two awkward gears. The gap between the first group and the second group was surprisingly big (felt like a couple minutes as I was on the side of the road fussing with the derailleur, and that was only 15 min into the race). Shortly after that group went by, another group came by at which point I decided I better just try to ride with them and gave up trying to get my bike to shift. I managed to stay with that group and did a lot of pulls at the front during the flats and grinding for my life on the hills (even gapped the group at one point on one hill grinding away). My avg heartrate was 5 beats higher than a year ago on race day (same race) when I made the second pack (I didn't make the first pack last year on the first hill). Had I not had the derailleur malfunction my strava board likely would have just been a giant column of PRs. Oh well.

My 60 min NP was 241 on race day despite riding with two speeds: Hard and very hard. That's only 1 watt shy of race simulation day! How is that even possible? So frustrating; Average power for the whole race was 181 watts. For 1 hour was 192. This race was supposed to be my FTP test. Hope that wasn't too much info. Oh, I even shaved my arms and legs for this race and I created an air foil with my race bib per a GCN youtube does science video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3-55E8zOBs#t=13m13s

(Sept 3) 3 day rest TNR: 196 hour power; 233 NP. -- 5 min power 270, NP 283. -- 20 min power 219, 244 NP
(Sept 10) Race Sim TNR: 194 hour power; 242 NP. -- 5 min power 260, NP 276. -- 20 min power 227, 260 NP
(Sept 15) Race day: 192 hour power; 241 NP. -- 5 min power 275, NP 314. -- 20 min power 222, NP 257

Obviously race day 5 min power was taken before the malfunction.

rubiksoval

Nice job!

Sounds like you unfortunately found yourself running afoul of one of the biggest rules of racing/events: nothing new before the race. Sometimes it's unavoidable if something breaks, but anything you can do to test it out as robustly as possible the day before can save some headache (again, not always possible).

NP is not a reliable measure of threshold. Some people are more inclined to being able to make repeated super hard efforts followed by long recoveries. If you want to test it out, go out for one hour and do 6-7 max one minute efforts as hard as possible with 7-10 minutes of recovery in between. You may be able to get an NP of 250-260+ watts for the hour if you're good at those shorter efforts. I can generally have an NP 40 watts harder than FTP for workouts like that, with only 5-6 minutes of hard riding and 45+ minutes of z1/z2 riding. It's a goofy algorithm in that regard (Strava's weighted power algorithm is a bit different and will give you a lower number because it weights the harder parts less).