Naturally anaerobically gifted athletes, how did you turn your anaerobic power into aerobic power?

Anaerobically gifted athlete here. Also married to one.

Ride more. Keep pedaling. Forget intervals. Forget quality. Pedal more.

Your 3-30min power will always be better than you’re long power. It will always respond more and better to training.

That grants you a luxury. You can do less intensity. Even with exclusively zone 2 work, your short power will improve.

Genetics are powerful. So is training history.

If you’ve lifted a lot, amassed muscle, or were a born sprinter, you have the amazing luxury of never needing to do a hard interval workout and you’ll always blow the doors off of your peers for short-duration power.

My wife is the same. Here’s an anecdote:

63kg

2020:
1200W peak power
580 W 1-min power
305W 5-min power
260 W 20-min power
240 W 1hr power
200 W 4hr power

2 years of virtually no structured workouts, and certainly nothing harder than FTP. Rode, ran, swam. A lot. Avoided intensity like the plague. Did ultra-endurance stuff. Ran a marathon. Everested (trenched, actually). etc. No lifting. No plyos. No sprinting. Limited racing, and always in the break.

Result:

End of 2021:
1150 W peak power
650 W 1min power
330 W 5min power
285 W 20min power
260 W 1hr power
225 W 4hr power

That’s roughly 10% gains across the board, all the way from 1-min power to 6-hr power, even though her training looked like she was training for RAAM or 70.3/140.6.

You can’t take the sprint out of the born sprinter. But you can develop the fitness.

Careful though, sprinters can damage & fatigue themselves more from workouts than non-sprinters. Ride more. Ride easier. Ride more.

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