This is basically the way I view the purpose and result of the TR ramp test. I don’t think of the test giving me an FTP per say, but merely a number to use to base percentages off for workouts in the plans. We all have to accept the number isn’t perfect, and each of needs to adjust the effort as required to get as close to the prescribed load as was intended. I know it’s a little hard to do sometimes, but I think most people get a pretty good grasp once they’ve gone through a full plan or two.
I’m 2.5 weeks into my current plan, and I feel my “FTP” is giving me a pretty good load for my workouts to feel as intended. I need to bump the vo2 max efforts a bit, but the longer efforts are in the right zone. Once a workouts feels a bit easy, I’ll bump it a bit and retest at the end.
I believe Coggan says you can hold your threshold anywhere from 30-80 minutes depending on training. So if you say FTP = threshold then that’s where you fall.
In the zwift world, there is an alp du zwift climb that is a great test of ~1 hour power. When I was training for a race w long climbs last year, I did it in 50 minutes @ 97% of tested ftp. It was a really hard effort, but I could have dug out another 3% and another 10 minutes if it were a real race situation. I agree that you need to have trained for long hard intervals to hit a tested ftp for an hour, but i expect most people just don’t have a good enough reason to try. It’s a miserable exercise.
The thing is that the people who actually need to use it for pacing (basically TTers and people entering long hill climb events) will also be the ones who don’t need to rely on the ramp test as they will have race and training results to go by. I don’t imagine anybody is sitting on the start line for a 40k TT A race with only a ramp test result to guide their pacing. Apart from anything else, even if the ramp test was a highly accurate estimation of 1 hour sustainable power, it would be an estimation that was specific to the indoor setup. Could easily be a few % off by the time you factor in all the potential differences from riding outdoors.
Personally I do quite a bit of TTing and long hill climbs and find that power targets need to be taken with quite a big pinch of salt anyway. If it’s an A race for which I’ve tapered then I’m often capable of putting out better numbers than anything I’ve done in the lead up (which is the point of tapering!). Figuring out the number on any given day is more of an art than a science and factors in RPE, HR plus all my experience of tapering, testing, racing, etc.