I'm 32 pages late to this (how did I not see this before?) but the overriding thing on my mind is inaccurate PMs on Zwift. You see pictures of people posting their sub hour Alpe and, I'm stereotyping here, but you look at the picture, the position, and you think, okay, on a great day, that person might be able to do 15 mph on a flat road, forget about going 8 mph up a hard climb for an hour. (On Zwift my best Alpe time is around 90 min, my one and only Ventop is like 180 min or some ridiculous amount of time, and generally it takes me 3x longer to do a climb compared to the KOM.)
Combine that with "I just got (accurate) powermeter and now my FTP is down from 300w to 160w." And I sort of smirk inside because, yeah, the numbers the rider was putting down before seemed a bit unrealistic.
I think 350w is unusual. 300w is getting closer to "normal". The local rider that doped (caught by the gran fondo testing) was 340w doped. He seemed relatively compact, like maybe my height, so that number would have been impressive.
I max out at somewhere around 220w, and my weight bottoms out at about 72 kg (currently 80ish kg and maybe 180w). For me 3.1 w/kg, 220w ftp, the time I was at my best when I had a powermeter... in a Cat 3 crit I felt untouchable. I could do almost anything I wanted. Even in Cat 2 I was okay in the pack, couldn't really follow breaks, but I could go contest some sprints or felt like maybe I could have been up there until 200m to go. I couldn't sprint though, I was too gassed, esp after some of the longer crits, 40 miles or whatever.
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"...during the Lance years, being fit became the No. 1 thing. Totally the only thing. It’s a big part of what we do, but fitness is not the only thing. There’s skills, there’s tactics … there’s all kinds of stuff..." Tim Johnson