AI FTP and Real World Pacing

1

I have overall liked the new AI FTP updates and my training is improving, the workouts are the right difficulty, etc… Basically a really good experience. However, as I’m improving my AI FTP number it feels like it is getting further and further away from what I could actually do in the real world. I’m about to get an ftp bump from 320 to 330 and I expect that my workouts will continue to progress and to be appropriately difficult. However, I just feel like there is no way in hell I could ride 330 watts for any meaningful amount of time (maybe 10 minutes max). I get that TR choose to separate how they use FTP from the original and traditional definition of the metric. I get that it works well inside their ecosystem and their AI and for providing appropriate workouts, however if I was to pace a race based on their FTP number it would be a disaster.

My main question is about sweet spot work. I’m time crunched and have found that following the low volume base plan is working great. 1 hour Sweet spot Tuesday, 1 hour sweet spot Thursday, 1.5 hours Threshold over unders on Saturday. My sweet spot workouts are hard and achievable, but they feel more like steady state threshold efforts because my AI FTP is so high. Still achievable, but potentially not SS? For example my workout this morning was 4 x 10 at SS with 2 minutes rest. I rated it as hard. However I’m thinking this workout was more of a threshold workout rather than a SS. Shouldn’t I be able to do 40 straight minutes at SS if it was truly my SS? Instead the workout structure of 40 total minutes with 3 x 2 minutes rest seems more like the structure of a Threshold workout.

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Am I way off base in this thinking?

2

This is an issue I have been having, and quite a few others have also been quite vocal about this. AIFTP is not your FTP, that’s the first thing. My AIFTP is also so high that I would have a hard time holding it for more than 10 minutes. For this reason, I have my FTP manually lowered 10w. This makes my SS workouts in my actual SS zone and my o/u actually in the right zones. In addition, my z2 rides don’t get pushed into tempo.

Based on your observations, it sounds like you know what you can actually hold for 40-60m from your ‘sweetspot’ sessions. I would abandon the thought that AIFTP is actually your FTP. The value is more of an anchor to find the best workouts in the workout library. For me, the best workouts are found using a lower manually entered value, but this seems to be different for everyone. Just my experience.