I'm not missing his point at all. You can't ride a 1 minute effort at full bore like he was doing and hope to last. Period. Ever. It doesn't matter what formula you use. I could use a formula to divide Pie by Pi and multiply the Crr of the foil plate the pie came on rolling across a table and in all honesty it'll be almost as accurate as trying to calculate from either of the above. You will suffer exactly like he described if you blast it from the get go and hope to hold on.Originally Posted by smaryka
Are you talking L6 as a zone calculated from your FTP, or one-minute efforts based on a percentage of your known peak 1min power?
Two different things there, which may explain why you are missing Jibberjim's point.
1 minute efforts are weird beasts. Short enough to trick your mind into thinking you can just nail it but about 20 seconds too long to really ride it like that. It's a 1 minute time trial that initially requires pretty good pacing - I used to find the first 15 seconds or so were key and set the tone for the rest of the effort. By 45 seconds you'll know whether you paced right - there's no if's and buts at that point. Just like 20 minute L4 efforts based off your best threshold that you'll ride and might tweak a bit power wise to suit, you'll likely have to experiment to get a level you can just about hold and still do the next interval well.
... and there in lies the beauty of 30 second efforts. Full smash, all dash. Being not a fast twitch kinda guy, I always found that these helped immensely with the 1 minute effort. Even if you go extremely hard there's a really good chance you'll be ready to go when the next interval is due to start. You might feel like puking but the legs will nearly always be up for the challenge unless you're ready to bonk or cramp. We used to do up to 15 - 30 seconds on with 30 seconds rest. Brutal but doable... especially after 12x1 minute efforts with a minute in between each. Pass the bucket and wet towel please.
In training you're never going to be able to repeat a full motivated "one off" best effort. If you are, then it's time to reevaluate your best 1 minute effort power. For one, you're not as motivated and secondly you're not going to be as fresh - mentally or physically. It also matters how well you paced the previous 1 minute effort. It doesn't matter if you're Francois Pervis (world record kilo TT) or a slob like me, you can't go flat out for a minute at max effort (best 30 second effort) and hold the pace. It's impossible. If you do that you will die a thousand deaths then you either make the following rest extremely long or you call it quits for the day. IF you have a complete season of racing under the belt and have quite a few years of racing in the bag too then you'll find that the level of leg destruction is less but it's still going to effect the next interval. At that point it's a case of seeing if you can get acceptably close to the numbers. If you can't then you're not going to improve - so you go home. If you're fairly new to the world of L6 then it's game over unless you're naturally blessed with the ability to tolerate such efforts. Learn from it and try not to let it happen again.
If you do get to 45 - 50 seconds and you know you've gone way too hard, it's probably best to get off the gas in the quest for damage limitation. Try the next interval and see.
1 minute efforts are also weird in the fact that if you're a slow-twitcher and never really train L6, when you first start doing it you'll have to redefine where your L6 effort really is every couple of weeks for the first three months. Just when you thought you got it all sussed out, you're playing suck-it-and-see all over again. Sweet. As the years of training progress, you'll still get nice gains at the start of each year over the level at the start of January but they'll take longer to come.
