what kind of workouts?

the season is over. my nice break is over. now i'm just putting in miles with one day a week going hard doing whatever(tempo, telephone pole to telephone pole hard, a hard hill, whatever...its my longer ride and the hard one of the week).
i ran into a friend yesterday who is very very strong. he trains weird, cause he is 90% fit year round. just one of those super strong guys..towards the end of our workout he upped the pace pretty much. i stayed glued to his wheel. . we rode on a square 4 mile circut. with the wind at our backs we were flying.. it hurt but i hung on. i sat relaxed on my bike and stayed on him. into the wind he really put the hammer down. i stayed on his wheel as close as i could.. about 20 minutes later we were done. nice hard longer training ride with the last 8+ miles very hard. i was happy being able to stay on his wheel, wheather he was hammering with a tail wind or really pushing it into a head wind..
QUESTION.... what specific training should i do to be able to pull thru and help him.... rotate with him if that was a race and we broke away.??? i could have went thru with a tail wind, but if i would have had to rotate in the head wind, the pace would have slowed 2 mph.
so what specific training is to be done to have the power to pull thru and rotate?
thanks alot

Best training you can do is what you just did: keep riding with him. Be aware however that you likely were riding at a higher relative intensity (and pain) than he was. As a result, you did more "damage" and will require more recovery time. He may be ready to go out and do it again within the next day or two, but if you need an easy recovery ride, do that instead. IMO, hammering once or twice a week like you did is plenty. Be patient and you'll see progress.

However, the second point is that even with a couple years of hard training and dieting, you may never progress to be as fast a rider as he is. I know a couple of guys here who are genetically-gifted, ie, high VO2 max aerobic capacity and high w/kg sustained power. They both ride "for fun" a lot, going out on the race-training rides once or twice a week like you just described, but do no structured training (ie, intervals, FTP,etc). At some point, we all have to accept that there are faster riders that we'll never be able to trade pulls with or hang with on the steep climbs, and that's OK too.

I suggest doing solo rides around the same route and trying to maintain the same pace.
It may be hard to duplicate the same wind conditions but it will give you an idea of where you are and maybe what you need to work for.

__________________
Dope,when training and talent just aren't enough.

thanks
any type of intervals on a trainer, so i get more power? i was looking for a comparison to just riding/drafting him, to what specific intervals to do to rotate with him. 1 minute intervals on the trainer? 4 minute intervals on the trainer. this 20 minute hard tempo i always read about would no where come close to our leg turnover and the mph we were going. so would 1-4 minute very hard intervals be the training to do? and doing these 1 time a week souuldnt burn anyone out.
thanks alot fpr all the kind comments.

20-30min/threshold intervals are your bread and butter... the base of your training upon which everything else is build upon.. those higher intensity workout constitute icing on the cake. what you want to do is build your aerobic engine to the highest capacity you can.. you simply will never be able to ride at those higher intensities for that lenght of time and repeatably unless you lift your threshold up to a higher level... what you need to understand is that for YOU.. you were riding at what would have been an unsustainable intensity... but remember your friend wasn't.. he was riding at threshold or riding slightly above- below it... to be able to work with him you need to build your threshold to a similar level..

building threshold takes years... maxing your anaerobic capacity literally takes 4-6 weeks of some anCap training usually taken just before the start of the racing season season.. if you want to improve... the lion share of your time during the year should be taken up by doing threshold work... the other thing is that you should try to never let your fitness wane too much (i try to never take more that 2 weeks off at a time)... this means that you never have to start back from scratch and you can always be basically riding to raise threshold... you don't want to have to be doing weeks of L1-2 work to build your endurance because you took too much time off..

Given that your season is over, I am not sure why you want to hang with someone who is 90% fit 100% of the time (if I am reading that correctly).

I would think that building your base for next season and FTP would be priorities. If you had trouble with the turnover, why not add 10x1 minute drills done at tempo/LT at 100+ rpm? That in addition to 2x20s at SST would be a good winter workout, though I am happy for other (contrarian) views.

The ultimate (at least the longest) thread about building FTP on a trainer is the epic "It's killing me but..." started by SillyOldTwit (Tyson) back in 2006. Lot's of good coaching tips on training with power. It did go off track at the end, due to bogus load readings that Tyson was seeing on his home trainer. But before then, it's a gold mine.

Suggest you find the thread using the "Search" button, then start reading and follow his journey.....just don't try to read it all in one night!

I just went back and found that link a couple of days ago: It's killing me but..........

-Dave