Sprinters do well in ultra endurance?

Don’t type yourself until you’ve been doing this for about ten years. And even then…

First, a 1-minute effort is still about 50% aerobic – that’s why 100m swimmers do so many easy laps. Yes, working on technique, but also working the aerobic energy system that is half of their race (for runners, the weight-bearing impact changes everything, so they can’t do much aerobic work).

A 2-minute effort is about 60-65% aerobic. Get out to 4 minutes and it’s now 70%+. What cyclists think of as “short anaerobic efforts” are still primarily fueled by aerobic metabolism.

If you have good 2-minute power, you could become an ultra rider if you wanted to – not as good of an ultra rider as a guy who has a 350 watt threshold but can’t crack 700w for 5 seconds, but you could do fairly well nevertheless. It would just take several years of training to emphasize the lower energy demand (calcium-calmodulin, if you want to get all technical about it) aerobic pathways, and give the 2min blast-offs a rest.

I saw myself as a FTP, pure TT power guy for years. In the last three I’ve changed my emphasis to 3-8 minute power. I’m better at that now than the TT efforts, though my FTP is still about what it was.

We are malleable.

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