The race instead of the test - Page 2

Re: The race instead of the test

What did your peak 1 minute, 5 minute and 20 minute powers look like? I see the peak 5 second from the screenshot, did that occur while contesting the sprint or jumping hard during the race? If 675 watts was your peak during the sprint, you should also be planning some L7 sprint workouts to bring that up a bit.

Taking a look at your 1, 5, and 20 minute best efforts, especially if they were fairly steady will give you some insight into your strengths and help you develop a plan to target your weaknesses. If for instance you did 260+ steady for a 20 minute or longer period then your new FTP estimate probably isn't too far off and you should be able to complete your 2x20s near that level, at least on good days.

Convert your 5 sec, 1 and 5 minute best efforts into W/kg and see how you line up on Coggan and Hunter's chart. Don't worry so much about what category the chart predicts, see whether you're stronger in the short, long or mid durations and figure out what you need to work on. If your FTP is near 250 watts and you're not really light then FTP is probably your priority but your results for the shorter efforts can help determine when and how much L7, L6 and L5 work you need as well.

Also take a look at how many times and how much you went beyond your FTP during the race. Try to remember if any particular efforts pushed you to your max or required you to sit in and recover. These are your matches and knowing how far above FTP you can go and how often helps tell you how many matches you have in your book. This should also help direct future training.

Ideally the race would have been larger and more competitive, but I bet there's a lot of good info in that race file beyond a current FTP estimate but you'll have to dig into it look at the data in creative ways and see what it can teach you. If this stuff doesn't make sense, you should reread Hunter and Coggan's book. If it still doesn't make sense you should hire a power savvy coach like Ric or others on this forum to help you interpret your results and plan accordingly.

Good luck,
Dave

Re: The race instead of the test

Seems a pretty safe bet that the peak power numbers occured during the race, not during warmup or cooldown. Just scroll down that same summary bar you posted, turn the eyeball icon on for every effort you want to investigate (1 min, 5 min, 20 min) in turn. Make sure the eyeball icons are turned off for all other segments. You'll see the selections colored black on your chart in WKO+ and that will tell you exactly when they occured. Right click the selected segment in the scroll table and you can choose to zoom segment to see just that part of your ride.

Convert your numbers to watts/kg and hold them up to Hunter and Coggan's chart and it should tell you where 260W/71 kg or 670W/71 kg puts you against other athletes. Only you know if 71 kg is your ideal weight but you can pump up W/Kg by raising watts or dropping Kg either approach or a combo of both can help.

Your 4th place finish suggests you're on par or close to your peers, but digging deeper into your data can give you even more insight and suggest ways to improve.

-Dave

Re: The race instead of the test

To determine your FTP, you could also have a look at the power histogram and find out where the most significant power drop occured. Your FTP is probably in the middle of the bar to the left of the largest drop.

But be careful - a race of just 58 minutes might be too short to actuelly tell enough.

Re: The race instead of the test

Carmol's suggestion is good, but don't look at the 8 week power profile, look at the power profile from your race. Trends in the long term histogram are easier to spot, but if your fitness is changing or you're doing very structured training like indoors SST work the histogram drop can be misleading. For instance if you are on a steady diet of indoors SST you won't have attempted to hold higher power outputs and your FTP based on the histogram step will result in underestimation. The histogram step down approach is based on the assumption that riders tend to work as hard as they can without blowing up. If you're pushing (like in a race or on hard group rides) then you probably keep bumping up against FTP and you'll end up with the big histogram step down. If you're not pushing yourself to and above FTP then this approach will be misleading. Anyway look at the histogram from the race and maybe resize the bins and limit the range to say 100 W to 300W. That should show you a step down if there is one.

Do yourself a data collection favor for next week's race. Put your PT into interval mode (press and hold the left button until the interval number is displayed and stays on) treat your ride out to the race and the race itself as seperate intervals. Don't try to nail the exact start of the race, thirty seconds or a minute before the start press both buttons for a moment to start the second interval. Do the same just after the race finishes, that will give you AP, NP, IF, TSS, mins, maxes, etc. for just the race effort. If you get off the bike or cruise around and socialize then start yet another interval as you set off for home of off for additional training.

I run my PT in interval mode all the time whether I'm doing structured intervals or just want to isolate different sections of the ride. It makes it easy to read the data when the individual blocks are all marked with starts and stops and stats are captured individually. I usually disable visibility (turn off the eyeball icon) in WKO+ for the rest or filler intervals between the periods of interest.

-Dave

Re: The race instead of the test

Eliminate the zeros and enlarge the bin size to 15 to 20. It might be possible to see more.

But as I said before, I think a mass start race shorter than 90 minutes will not allow to see the FTP in the histogram analysis (and I don't think, in any other analysis either).

So look forward to races that last longer or do a real formal test. If you're really interested in your FTP or are unsure about it, then I do not understand, why you don't do a formal test tomorrow. You had a rest week last week and a race 48 hours before - from a physical point of view (freshness and sharpness), there are no better situations to get the best and most accurate guess for your FTP. Tomorrow you'll be fresh and ready at the same time.

Re: The race instead of the test

One other thing to try: use the mouse to drag a selection in the chart around just that part that was the race. You'll get a new summary stats entry in the scroll down bar for the selection with AP, NP, etc. If you had a lot of warmup, cooldown and apres race noodling around you'll definitely see the AP go up and probably see a few watts added to NP as well. NP is heavily weighted to the higher powers because of the pwr^4 averaging, but I'd still expect it to go up a bit if you eliminate the non-race periods.

Re: The race instead of the test

just do your workouts... do a 2x20 and guestimate your FTP from that... what is 5W this way or that way going to do to your training levels...? nothing! you can guess your FTP pretty good just by doing your workouts... you can figure out how fast to do your 20x20s by doing some 20x20s.. you know you can now do your 20x20 faster if it gets to easier to do your 20x20s at the previous level.. formal testing maybe, maybe a few times a year... but most of the time guestimating is just fine and is not going to change your training intensities one bit...