I’ve been riding MTB competitively for years, but strictly Downhill. Few podiums and 3rd in DH nationals master group this year…so decent.
I recently started structured training, as while I’m fast pointed downhill and it’s all anaerobic work…I get dropped by everyone on All mountain rides.
After sweetspot base 1 my ftp was at 179 up from 150. That’s 2w/kg for me, which I found surprisingly low considering I’ve been doing a mix of polarised or v02 max intervals twice a week for a year and riding HARD every sat for hours.
A few years back I broke my wrist badly in 5 places and needed 6 months to get back on the MTB. In the mean time I picked up trail running 3 times a week, and my fitness skyrocketed. I found it MUCH easier to progress to a high level in running than cycling. My first trail race was 13km and I nearly passed out in a bush after vomitting. It took me over 4 hours to finish. 6 months later I was around 1.5 hours for the same trail and came 13th.
Anyone else find it much easier to get better running fitness than cycling fitness. Seems I need to put in almost triple the work to progress at cycling…
1.5 hours for 13km is a great improvement, but I’m not sure many would consider it high level.
2w/KG at 179w means you weight ~90kg? That’s a pretty low FTP figure for anyone active at that weight, what equipment & protocol are you using to measure this, and is it accurate/ calibrated?
Cycling and running are very different, though for running, starting from nothing there’s a definite need to increase training time/ mileage steadily so that your cardio doesn’t outmatch your joints and ligaments and get you injured.
For cycling that’s much less of an issue so you can train a lot more and bump into problems like fuelling much earlier.
Are you on any kind of unusual diet that restricts carbs?
I am sure some people are better suited to one or the other. In terms of lifetime performance, my running results are arguably on a much higher level than my cycling ability would show. I have found i very hard to progress in cycling. Whether that’s due to having picked up cycling in my late 30s, or due to some physiological reason, I don’t know.
I’m 50, running since I was 23, and riding bikes seriously since I was 35. Running has always had a bigger bang for the buck for me, fitness-wise. YMMV, but I’ve also found when I had to take breaks from either, that it was easier to come back to the bike if I had been running, rather than coming back to the running from bikes.
I basically took the past ~3 years off from running and started again with the new year, and am just now back to > 5k distance runs. It’s been tough, but satisfying. I’ll never stop riding, but the time away has taught me how important the runs are for me, too.