TMonk

In my experience I need to be really fresh for the limiter to be my aerobic system. If I have any sort of (even mild) fatigue, pain in my legs is the limiter.

procrit

Even during 20' intervals some portion of your power is going to be produced anaerobically. Maybe only a 5%, but that 5% is most likely what is causing your legs to "fail". Improving vo2 and efficiency is going to allow more of that power to be produced purely aerobically, increase the time to failure and increase your 20-60' power. Improving lactate clearance will allow you to use more of the anaerobic glycolytic system, while being able to keep blood lactate levels lower. Some of the 'efficiency' can be gained with low cadence / high muscle tension work, so you need less muscle fibers recruited to generate the same power. You might also do some 5-10' intervals as well to work on lactate clearance and possibly bump up vo2. Doing long endurance rides will also help improve stroke volume, not just at the beginning of a ride, but allow you to keep the higher stroke volume during longer rides. Lots of people don't understand that the reason the pros have the same FTP at the beginning of the race as at the end of the race is because of that. Lot of text book stuff, this isn't anything I came up with on my own. Hopefully it helps.

That's a lot of power too man, I'm jealous lol.

burnthesheep

Question.........is it also kind of normal that the less trained an individual is, the more the VO2 contribution to that aerobic power will be? Kind of like how someone like me is closer to 92% for hour vs 20min power compared to a pro who might be more like 95% ?

Either way.....over 500 TSS last week. Legit. Before last week I had failed to play nanny with TP to correct the rTSS to HRTSS. I feel the rTSS might reflect how you feel when tossing runs into bike stuff, but as for actual "fitness" I think the HRTSS works better for me. I thought about going for 30min easy at lunch today.......legs said nah. Taco lunch day.

Hermes

Also, I learned this weekend that teams are not needed to win UCI world tour stage races and having some baby fat is okay. I want to be on Tadej Pogačar’s diet - I think.

TheKillerPenguin

Well, the thing is this is across the power curve, I used FTP as the example because I'm doing a lot of FTP lately. With tempo it obviously takes longer but still happens, vo2 is the same deal - always legs before lungs.

It is interesting you talk about low cadence work, a rower I know just recommended the same thing. I guess in rowing the aerobically-skewed will do some Rocky 4 **** like drag a can on a string behind the boat to develop power per stroke.

RE: watts, there's always a bigger fish...

Hermes

Try a flying (no standing start) pursuit style efforts on the road with high cadence 110 -120 rpm or 2-3’ @ 140%. That should jack up your breathing. Legs may still crap out but your lungs will burn...more. I may cough for an hour or more after a pursuit race.

procrit

Have you ever done a 3 minute critical power test?

TheKillerPenguin

Yep, a bunch of 3-4min max efforts in the books. I mean I can taste blood after doing that sort of thing, but it's never my lungs that make me slow down, it's my legs.

procrit

Sounds like you need to channel Jens Voigt and just tell your legs to shut up lol.

gsteinb

Back in the day we'd use 36 hole big gauge spoke box rims with heavy tires for training. I have no idea if it made things faster on race day, but I guess we broke less carbon in training. Welp, I guess there wasn't really carbon then.

hubcyclist

I'm on the last week of the first half of the CX specialty plan on Trainerroad. It's been interesting, there are some workouts I'm absolutely nailing with no modifications, while others (like last week's 2.5min intervals and some 15/15 workouts) where I have to adjust the intensity a bit. Today was a series of short intervals going 15-30-45-60sec at 180-150% then reverse order. 0.9 IF. Pretty doable for me, the 60sec at 150%, for me, is tough. But nailed it.

In addition to inside training, I'm riding 60mins a day with my son outside, I've been averaging like 70-80w on those rides and burning 250-300 calories, so that's a bonus as I want to drop those last 5lbs lol. His exercise routine is tied to this reward system we have with his garmin vivofit, so I try to try to provide little incentives for him to ride faster (like extra if he hit 12mph avg for the hour, which he did, now I've got 12.5 as the incentive mark). I ordered him some microshift shifters because the old sora ones are pretty awful for kids, mainly with the FD, it takes such a big swing to shift, so anywhere hilly is kind of out of the question at the moment. Hopefully those help.

I am thinking of doing a 3 week zwift racing "season" after next week in lieu of doing the 2nd half of this specialty plan. I figure it'll get me some tough rides without too much structure and give me a chance to do something competitive this year before going back to the base program starting in November. So expect to hear some complaints about sandbagging from me in the coming weeks lol

procrit

One thing I've noticed is that the heavy rims with lots of spokes and draggy tires makes power numbers easier to hit on flat roads. It feels kind of like going up a hill where you can maintain muscle tension a little better compared to aero wheels and low drag tires. Makes me wonder if there was a way to make wheels have even more drag, like something that would clip onto the spokes, as a training aid.

TMonk

Dropped on lap 1 of the "A" 3R Sundown Race series, Watopia Seaside Sprint 30km. Wasn't mentally ready for the big surge up into the volcano. 3 others got dropped and I should have just slotted in with them and picked up other dropped riders throughout the race, but just folded instead.

This is always sort of a weird time of year for me mentally, as by this point my fitness is approaching a local minimum throughout the year. The sliding CTL means really great performances for a few weeks but then I actually start to get weaker, which of course is to be expected. I often top out at around 100 (CTL) in January, then hold 90-ish for a lot of the season. 67 currently.

I'm going to do another Z race tomorrow to try and redeem myself, but it might be time to give it a rest for a couple months so I don't psyche myself out too much. Not sure what the actual/non-virtual racing season will be like in 2021, but I'll be training for it come November.

caloso

I'm doing a Zwift training plan. I started it when the AQI was horrible. Now that it's cleared up so much, I want to ride outside. Tried to figure out a way to put the workout on my Garmin but lost patience. Finally just wrote it out on a strip of tape and stuck it to my stem. Old school.

Hermes

When a 360 watt FTP racer asks about training, it is sort of like a great white shark asking the sea lions where and what he should eat. They swim away quickly.

gsteinb

As of now I think I'm going to other way with it.

esarhaddon

I really enjoy zwift race series like the Tuesday special 3R Races (this month being the Sundown series). If you can pick a consistent time each week, you end up racing the same group of people most of the time and it feels a little bit less like you are racing alone in your pain cave. That helps me for motivation. Plus the Sundown series both has a six week GC competition and split the A and A+ riders, which not many races do.

Also, I picked up the Cat A victory in the next timeslot (11:40 am PDT) today. So that was fun.

TMonk

Nice. I do appreciate that they split out the A+'s for this one. I didn't know that Tuesday was for the special 3R races, I'll have to tune into that more. I have noticed some regulars with certain morning race time slots. Looking forward to getting more out of it once I'm ramped up with training again.

TheKillerPenguin

I remember when open pros were the training wheel hotness and Ksyrium Elites were for racing...

big john

I just sold a set of Ksyrium Elites which had a new rear rim due to me ripping the spoke nipples out of the rim for the third time. They were purchased to replace some Cole wheels which have a broken freehub body that I can't find a replacement for..
Now using Open Pro rims again after going astray.

Hermes

TTT Tuesday at Fiesta. 31:44 @ 23.3 mph for 20K with harder than normal wind. New PR for this workout and setup.

An interesting aspect of these workouts is speed. My brain loves speed. If I am not riding fast, my brain is not happy. My hypo is that my brain makes physiological headroom to generate speed meaning, it sets the physiology governor to a higher set point.

burnthesheep

Almost an hour at lunch. Sweet spot nonstop. 240w, 24.2mph. With the worst aero road helmet possible. I'm going to swap and run my Evade for TT bike training rides. That Giant aero road helmet is horrible for TT.

By the way. Profile Design can suck it. Design bottle cages with the sole purpose to be a BTS cage and eject my bottle God knows where on my FIRST ride with it. POS. It was a sweet spot ride, so the palate wasn't parched at all. If I was halfway out on a ride with some hard intervals and it were hotter out........I'd have been sending a strongly worded worthless email.

Instead, I'll pony up and buy Gorilla cages. Ughhhh.

TMonk

Nope! Instead I had an extra glass of wine whilst playing music last night and went on a 45 min MTB ride this morning. I'm really doing a good job at this whole off season thing.

procrit

Has anyone tried the Osymetric or Absolute Black oval chainrings?

Hermes

No but I have tried oval rings. Meh. And did not shift well. And I train and race at the track so in the end, I thought just stick with round. Although, at times oval felt nice.