Upper L2 Endurance Rides



bogdan_petrica

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Mar 21, 2015
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This is my first post here and I want to say hello to everybody. I signed up because I saw there are knowledgeable people around here regarding training with a power meter.

Some background, this is my first time using power meter for training, I had a power meter on the bike last year but was more for entertainment then anything else. After a long winter when I detrained almost completely I did a 20min max test which yielded 212W a month ago. So an estimated FTP of 200W for 67kg( pretty low I guess ).

So I started doing some L2 endurance rides and up until now, I was trying to keep the avg watts in top L2 ( that is around 140W ), with occasional burst in L3 when getting over small hills. I also tried to keep the legs spinning all the times, for example my last ride was 3h total duration and time in 0-20W range was 3%.

Is this the correct way to train in L2? I am asking as the last ride was pretty tough for me, I was fatiguing after two hours and I started to experience pretty heavy cardiac dirft( from around 140bpm at the start of the ride up to 165bpm in the last minutes ).

The whole ride had a TSS of 158, so no that high, also the IF was 0.73, with a Normalized Power of 147W and avg. 143W.

Accordingly to 'Training and Racing with a Power meter' an IF < 0.75 is 'Active Recovery', but my avg. power was at top of L2 power zone? Probably there is a mistake in the book as I think that IF values should correlate with power levels directly.


Any opinions on this are welcomed.
 
Well, hello. I think people are more opinionated than knowledgeable.

My view of "power zones" is that they should depend on the length of your effort. So a 75% effort would be 75% of what 100% of what you could do for that length of time. So 75% of FTP for 1 hour and 70% or so for 2-3 hours would be the same "power zone."

As for the correct way to train: You train in a manner that gets you the improvement you want. So you will be training differently than anyone else.

For example: I missed a few days of training. I went out yesterday for 4.5 hours with the goal of 80% FTP and no big efforts. But goals are easy to forget. For 25 of the last 40 minutes I found myself chasing a fellow at 100+% FTP. The time my heart rate was above LT at the end was perhaps the best training of the day.
 

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