Blowing past FTP on race day

Training
16

Couple thoughts from my experience and not directly related to your situation/question:

  1. I ALWAYS outperform my training on race day if I have properly executed my training and preparation for racing. There’s a few reasons why- I’m better rested/less fatigued on race day, more awake (e.g. not working out 30 mins after waking up), more motivated to push, properly warmed up/primed, and I use fueling/performance aids that I rarely if ever use in training (caffeine, gels/sports nutrition, AMP human). Reason for the last being that I’m cheap, I really don’t like taking gels/straight sugar unless I have to, and I don’t consume caffeine at all outside of racing. In my experience, my FTP is probably 5% higher than I can hit on a sustained effort in training, and my running threshold pace is ~15 second/mi faster than in training. Personally I think it’s a huge motivator knowing that I have more in the tank on race day and can blow past what I’ve been regularly doing.

  2. A proper warm up for me makes a huge difference especially in running. I don’t do this for most workouts because it’s too time consuming, and I would rather be running/riding. But for me, that’s probably 10-15’ easy activity, followed by a couple threshold pushes, dynamic stretches, muscle activation, and a few strides/sprints/openers. Followed by 10’ of easy movement before getting ready to go, and a gel top off 10’ pre-race. All in 30-45’ of prep, which gets cut out for every day workouts because I’m not a pro with all day to fit in 20+ hour weeks.

  3. NP is useless for measuring FTP on anything that involves extended coasting or huge spikes. It works great on gently rolling terrain where you have a consistent effort with slight variations. Not so much when you have huge spikes above FTP, especially when combined with coasting/recovery periods. I had a 300NP for 3:30 off 310-315 FTP on a long mountain fondo this year, before I kinda cracked and could only hit 260s or so for hours 4-5. Also had 350NP in a circuit race for 30’ trying to split the field. There’s NO way I could hold either of those powers consistently for that duration on flat ground without recovery coasting.