I am a 34 yr old male, been using TR for 2nd year. I am not on a training plan, just mixing indoor and outdoor rides trying to keep similar TSS each week around 350. My FTP should be around 260-270.
Recently I had problems completing TR workouts, had to reduce the intensity and then bail out completely. This happened to me twice now in last 2 weeks.
My FTP is set at 260 in TR, which should be a bit lower than actual FTP, because I did an outdoor ride with max 20 min power of 288 10 days ago (so substracting 5% from that is 273) .
Even with the conservative FTP I was unable to complete https://www.trainerroad.com/cycling/workouts/1796-emerson. The workout is challenging but in normal conditions it should be perfectly doable for me.
The legs were dead after first 2 intervals, I had to reduce intensity by 5% and even after that I bailed out after 4th interval.
I am using Elite Direto, I have compared the power numbers with my power2max and they match pretty closely so this shouldnt be an issue.
I am also aware of differences between outdoor and indoor FTP, but in the past they were not much different, so determining FTP from my outdoor ride should be safe.
So I guess it just comes down to fluctuations in day-to-day form, but I didnt expect the fluctuations to be this big? I had a longer ride during weekend (3,5 hrs), which was a bit unusual and could cause bigger fatigue, but I had 2 days of recovery before the workout.
Comparing with my ‘real’ FTP of 273, i dont think I would be able to complete yesterdays workout with FTP set higher than 250, which is 10% lower
Do you guys have these kind of days where you have reduce the intensity by as much as 10%? Is it common?