yeah guy is insanely consistent, I find it interesting that he seems to do a 3 minute test fairly regularly. He also loves those 3x60 blocks at about 90%.
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He just posted these stats on his Instagram account. So you can see hours, and altitude days. Not sure if “training hours” is total riding, or excluding race hours…
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Number of anti-doping controles is quite huge.
Finally had time to watch the video. I am glad I haven’t met him there. It would be humiliating to be passed by a runner (triathlete, no less) when riding 
Over on Google Wattage, Coggan has argued many a time that Lydiard’s 1/4 was right at AeT, or on the cycling zone 2/3 borderline. I’m using his position.
He has had 21 wins. This means a test after each of them. Then many races require a pre-race medical examination which includes a doping test. Then, I don’t know how often he wore a leader’s jersey in a stage race but this would add to the number of controls, too. If you combine these in-training tests may not occur so often. And this is where the stuff is supposed to work. No implying anything but in-race testing catches only the dumb (and/or desperate) riders.
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What is a little bit odd for me, I see a tendency for more intense stuff among several pros. Different to previous years. And with intense I don’t meen structured HIIT intervals. No, more in line with the usual long-rides-with-stuff paradigm.
One of my favourite riders (because he gives hope to all of us who are caught in sprinters’ bodies but want to do fine in mountains/all-round): S Colbrelli
Since Dec 27 he’s on Gran Canaria, quite a package. And almost always some stuff within these long rides. So much to base is easy, strictly below LT1 all the time:
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Super interesting to look at his last few weeks, lots of stuff ~90% (assuming his strava 421w FTP is correct). Almost all of those 90% blocks have some low cadence work, his ride on Dec 21 for instance has 2 20 minute blocks around 250-360w, a 5 minute and a 16 minute also around that power. Each one he seems to alternate between 70 and 50rpm every 2 minutes or so.
Another thing I have noticed with him in particular is a lot of his rides end with a 10-20s sprint effort, this last sunday is an example with that same 2x20 and a sprint at the end.
This is typical Italian approach, like Michele Ferrari describes on his website: www.53x12.com. Activate faster fibres at low cadence then increase cadence to use that fibres in more agile way. So basically you train faster fibres without going over threshold.
By the way, do you know some websites or articels that desribe training like 53x12, what i read there was practical stuff. I also recommend Renato Canova letsrun posts, really interesting; Renato Canova conference about martathon traing: El método Renato Canova. Claves del entrenamiento de maratón - YouTube
I always enjoy rereading this take: EFR ~ Coaching Factsheets on the topic.
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Emanuel Buchmann - January so far - quite a package. And it is very obvious that they work on his limiter: being a pure diesel. The frequency of intense stuff is pretty high. Is this what is need to add turbo to the diesel? And Dan Lorang clearly reads the science, Jan 4h is Vaccari et al. (2020).
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For comparision, Anto Palzer, the former elite-skimo athlete who turned pro. He repeatedly said that his main limiter is the endurance. The miles in the legs. He noticed that in his first season. Hence:
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When did you start looking at this? Maybe the difference is due to the shifted race calendar of the last two years. This year, we’re expecting more normal races, so maybe they have started high-intensity race pre for the spring already.
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Excellent point. I can’t remember which podcast I was listening to, but my takeaway was it’d be tough to gain useful data from training on 2020/2021 alone due to the crunch of forcing everything later in the year in 2020 and then resuming “normal calendar” in 2021. Basically, the shortened offseason would look slightly different in early 2021 due to so much race volume into Late October/November 2020.
Some pros have years of Strava data available. You can look far back. This is really the first winter I see that many do a lot of stuff in the off-season.
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This tweet by https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelfreiberg (former AUS road champ) has guided my training since 2020
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McN watch - Jan 22 so far … Zone 2 building base phase is clearly over. Rides are shorter with more intensity. Just some ISM Zone 2 maintenance sessions
yesterday’s session, uffffff, almost 500W for this first 10min effort. And then still enough power left to do a sprint. However, not enough to take the Girona climb KOM. Still, this is where you see the difference to mere mortals. 500W for 10min at this weight!
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Someone over at ST linked this, quite interesting (for those who can still read beyond the length of a tweet or Insta post)
http://www.mariusbakken.com/the-norwegian-model.html
“Norwegian model” and the term “polarised” is not used once 
And very important, this comes from ST as well, "The threshold he is referring to isn’t your typical instagram threshold 
" Love it
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If i understand the article correctly, his threshold is 2.0-3.0mmol, which is similar to the lactate inigo san milan uses for his zone 2 / lt1/vt1/dfa a1?