@Brennus back to your story, did you have power before starting out on TrainerRoad? My time on TR was mostly between 220-250W (ignoring breaks and off-season dips below 200W), so I’m always fascinated by people that come in feeling good cycling fitness and then seeing big jumps. You really helped open my eyes to the flip side of fractional utilization (I’m an outlier on the high side, and ramp tends to under-estimate ftp). Pretty amazing to see 5-min power turn into 2 hour power!
No. I bought power meters and several trainers in a liquidation sale (remember when performance went bk?). So my bikes & trainer got power meters all at the same time. Thought I was pretty fit before picking up TR but my first ramp test was decidedly mediocre…and of course when I tried to just ride at my FTP for an hour that was a total fail! Ha!
You know, though, we’re kicking around numbers and the numbers maybe don’t look so impressive…not bad but not great. Consider this, though, I used to train diligently & peak just to claw my way up to a third rate gravel cyclist. There were riders at every race that I would mark and tell myself, ‘I want to hold this guy’s wheel for the first 20 miles at least.’ I raced a couple weeks ago…sold out race, lots of folks…three of those guys who used to drop me in the 1st half of every race were there. None of them finished w/in 20 minutes of me. For sure there are pro riders and DK champs that show up at these races & smoke me but the riders competing in my orbit now are way different than they were before TR. And I win a lot of races now…that never happened before TR.
Just the same, though, it’s not right to say I’m a loyal follower of TR plans! I’m always doing some screwball thing. But if we’re being honest, I’d say you are also an athlete that has sort of refused to ‘not succeed’. Whatever the training problem is you seem to be able to figure it out & I would say not everything that works for you works for me but it’s still undeniably working for you.