Great self-experiment. What other riding were you doing at the time, can I ask?
Sounds like the kind of thing I might give a go to this summer. Both of my main events for the year (both over 6hrs) are done by mid-May, so I’m thinking about a (totally arbitrary) goal of holding >= 4w/kg for >=60 minutes before the year is over.
10-12 hours/week
Gollnick workout on Thursday
Friday off
VO2max on Saturday
2-3 hour endurance Sunday
1.5-2 hour endurance monday
1-1.5 hour endurance tuesday
2 hour endurance wednesday
My only warning is that ~8 weeks before your event you should definitely de-emphasize Gollnick-type workout (switch to threshold endurance maintenance) and emphasize stochastic VO2/anaerobic work that is more event specific.
Unless you just like riding by yourself.
Basically is where my FTP sits - 285/300
IF was 1.03, TSS 106 which means my FTP was a little underestimated maybe. Just a little.
Maybe, maybe not; it could just be that everything went right that day and the slight overperformance isn’t statistically relevant.
99.2% for 61 minutes, probably 99.5%
In group ride back in about 2018 - 102% for best 60 minutes, guessing that was helped by the NP equation. I raised my FTP 5 watts after a long form (45 minute) test three weeks later.
Based on a ramp test FTP or aiFTP about 90%, so neither work for me.
I just spent 3.5 weeks going from barely 30 minutes at 100% FTP to 73 minutes at 100% FTP.
I did an all out effort on a big mountain climb here on my mountain bike, part of a monthly fitness challenge a few buddies and I do. Did 98% of FTP for 59 minutes. I was absolutely crushed after. Laying down in the parking lot and dry heaving.
Using this set of criteria I’m at exactly 100%
262 Watts on March 1st
No doubt you were going anaerobic and inevitably taking forced recoveries during dips, turns, etc…I remember doing a Suprathreshold effort last year for about 26 minutes climbing up Gibralter in Santa Barbara and it was basically all out for 26 minutes…I can’t imaging an hour at that pace…good lord.
I’ve done exactly 345 watts for an hour twice. Once was in a cyclocross race, which seems a bit crazy. If I remember NP was only 380 or so though, so it was a pretty consistent course.
The second I started a 2x20 workout on a sort of TTish loop, and after the first, decided at the do both back to back, and ended up going all the way through the hour, much more consistent than the CX race, but still not smooth.
My FTP in both these cases was probably around 360-370. Puts me in 93-96% or so. Still wish I had tried it on a more consistent bit of road or on the trainer, but it likely would not have been a positive thing.
SO many misconceptions in this thread…
FTP is the power equivalent to maximal metabolic steady state.* With only a moderate amount of endurance training, that is an intensity that can be maintained for at least 40 min. In highly trained/gifted endurance athletes, it is an intensity that can be maintained for as much as 70 min. The slope of the exercise intensity-duration relationship between these two values is quite shallow. Hence, my comment earlier that if you can’t maintain at least ~97% of your FTP for 60 min***…
…it ain’t your FTP.
*Which is really only a quasi steady state, and is really more a narrow range of intensities versus an absolute threshold… but I digress.
**No, FTP does not equal 60.000… min power. But, that was the question/challenge posed the OP, so…
Mentally I substitute FTP for CP in this excerpt from Skiba’s latest book (Scientific Training for Endurance Athletes):
CP is often a small % above FTP.
and
This book:
sits on my bookshelf next to the 2nd and 3rd editions of Training and Racing With A Power Meter
By accounts and appearances, Gollnick was a very…determined individual. He also had excellent reputation for scientific rigor - no assay could be implemented in his lab until he had personal experience with it and was satisfied.
Thus, being a participant in that study would have been like him, but he wasn’t. Not only was he too old (to match the reported demographics), but he had a fixed-rate pacemaker that limited his exercise capacity. (I believe one of his students did a case study of him for their thesis, but if so I can’t find any evidence that the study was published.)
Another misconception (sorry!).
The “dirty little secret” that fans of CP like Skiba (and Jones, Poole, etc.) never talk about is the fact that the precise value you obtain for CP depends on the duration of the tests used to calculate it. This is because the power (or speed) -duration relationship isn’t really hyperbolic/the work (or distance) -duration relationship isn’t really linear. Monod himself recognized this, and concluded that if CP was meant to represent “an intensity that can be maintained for a very long time without fatiguing”/was supposed to correspond to metabolic steady state, it should be calculated using tests of longer duration (out to 40 min, according to Monod).
ETA: 35 min is what was tested:
The present scientific “influencers”, however, advocate for using shorter tests, i.e., 15 min and less. This results in a higher value for CP, such that it overestimates maximal metabolic (lactate) steady state. Ironically, this is true even though Jones (with whom Skiba did his PhD) et al. claim that CP represents the highest exercise intensity at which all ATP is derived aerobically. The latter is obviously not true if whole body lactate content is increasing, meaning that their preferred approach for quantifying CP does not fulfill their own definition of it.
TL,DR: CP is higher than FTP only if you have overestimated CP.
well that explains why my FTP and (extended) CP in GoldenCheetah are basically the same.
But isn’t it reasonable that less trained athletes may not have the experience to push themselves that hard for that long (regardless of being within their physiological limits)? I think it depends on your definition of “can’t”. I suspect most people are hitting mental/motivation limits long before physiological limits when they say they can’t hold their FTP for 40+ minutes. I’m not bagging on those people (I’m probably in that group more days than not). Very few people are gonna be able to do that kind of effort without mental training and/or a big carrot out in front of them during the effort.
There’s also plenty of people in this thread who have never tried to hold their FTP that long (me being one of them).
There’s part of me that wants to, but at the same time, that’d be an effort that’d bury me pretty good, and at 46 y/o would take me some time to recover from…
On their own, I can’t say.
In a lab, with encouragement? Physiology, not psychology, is by far the primary limiting factor.
That said, some folks are indeed mentally weak - those are the easiest ones to beat in any race.
Then they shouldn’t even bother replying. It is self-evident that lack of a maximal effort makes any data irrelevant.
Not at all, the question asked about the highest percentage of FTP that people have actually ridden at for an hour.
That doesn’t in any way imply that you had to have tried to do 100%.
