You will want to do some VO2 work to push up your FTP sooner or later. If you’ve been doing SST work for 6 weeks or so, I would do that.
If you want to keep improving endurance, then you can go longer or harder. Just keep in mind that you’re burning a lot of calories, so replenish accordingly
85% is probably too high to realistically target for that duration. .8 IF is more reasonable. Might not seem like a big difference, but… I recently had an athlete complete the bike leg of Challenge Roth (112mi) in 4:15ish at a .78. Now, his FTP is quite a bit higher so the metabolic load is bigger. You might be able to do 85%, but I would build to that during the event rather than going out with that as my target. Critical to negative split things or you’re gonna have a bad time.
With respect to training, you don’t need to train 4.5hours at 80-85% to be able to do that during an event. You can definitely aim to push out to 2hrs at 90%, and then do some workouts where you’re running up to 3hours or more at 80-85%. When you start to get into the massive, massive efforts like we’re talking here, it’s not beneficial to train that level of specificity this close to your event.
Realistically, 5 weeks out, you probably have 2 more weeks to really train. You can do some specificity work and this is going to be pacing targeting. It’s really too late for you to try to progress more at 90%.
I’d have you doing long sustained efforts around target power, progressive endurance riding, stuff like that, building to 3 hours at tempo, doing pacing efforts late in your long rides, etc. In terms of aerobic adaptations, they hay is in the barn at this point.
I am again astonished by how quickly it is possible to extend time to exhaustion at sweetspot! A couple weeks ago I did an FTP test, managing 35min TTE at 362W. That was a 12W increase to my previous best, which explains the short TTE. The thought was then to start extending that TTE by doing a sweetspot block – starting with maybe 1h of TiZ and then extending. I thought that 325-330W would be a good range to start with.
In the first workout, I did 30min + 35min at 330W. Tough but manageable:
Based on my experience, I’d recommend people to sometimes try some SS workouts that on paper seem much too hard – you might be surprised at what you can do!Nice man must be doin somethin right
I tried to search this thread and saw a few people asked the same question but didn’t see an answer:
When you hit the max time you want to do for SS, what do you do next if you want to continue with SS TTE workouts?
let’s say I did 90% FTP for 90 min and I don’t really wanna extend out more than that. what next?
I do mixed blocks (2x/week hard workouts that rotate from TTE, VO2 max, sprinting here and there). I have no specific biking goals. just get fitter.
I was thinking of raising my power (say 5 watts) and starting my progression again. I figure I’ll eventually run into my FTP this way and ease my way into training FTP TTE. then retest when I hit ~60 min there.
Hi there. It depends on your goals. I would do threshold progression , but before that I will take week of recovery. You could do vo2 max progression. Both will increase your ftp or at least increase your fatigue resistance.
First off, no don’t add the 5W and start over, IMO. It’s kind of a waste of energy because physiologically it’s the same workout.
There’s no real “max time” at 90 min. I’ve taken people out to 2hrs before. Could go longer than that.
Some options: reduce rest between intervals or eliminate it entirely. Can you sit at 90% for 90 min? Extend to 2 or 2.5 hours (wouldn’t ever go beyond that without testing FTP again). Add bursts to your SST workouts. I do this a lot and my athletes seem to really like it as it breaks the monotony. The bursts I add are typically just accelerate leg speed for 10s, so if you’re at 90rpm doing 90%, you just bring your leg speed up to 110rpm or so and then settle back in at 90rpm/90%. You can put it in your workout as 125 or so % if you’re an erg guy.
Given that you’re doing mixed progression, you can switch to a sweet spot maintenance where you do 60-90 min workouts and then work the VO2 differently/more intensely, as well.
That said, there comes a time in everyone’s progression as an athlete where they need to change things up, so you might consider some other suggestions such as working closer to FTP (5-10W below) and extending time there, or doing something more FTP growth focused like over-unders.
In my experience, the SST progression is great for establishing a high-end aerobic base, particularly on a time crunched schedule, and while I do give sweet spot throughout the year, I do not do progressions like this all year long. SST for most guys after base is about threshold/sustained power maintenance with less fatigue, so I use it quite a bit during race season when guys are doing weekend crits, they do 3x20 mid-week or something like that.
Let me know if you have specific questions about any of that. happy to help!
thank you!
how much more benefit is there going to 120 min once you hit 90 min - rather than switching to 5-10 watts below FTP?
I feel like in my biking “career” right now 90 min is about as much as I wanna endure of something that’s pretty hard. (maybe that’ll change some day).
Yeah if I were you I would focus on trying to push FTP up with a mixed block of FTP work (threshold and/or over-unders) and VO2 based on what you’ve said. Do that for 1-2 cycles of 3 weeks or so, so probably 6 total workouts. The trick is progressing time at 5-10W below threshold, but you need to be quite a bit less aggressive about it. My rule of thumb is ~10% TiZ per week. So if you start at 40 min (e.g.), next week push to 44 or 45 with a 2x22 or 3x15. I typically keep threshold intervals no shorter than 10 min, and I seek to get to 15-25 min intervals as quickly as possible.
A typical progression might be something like 3x12 → 4x10 → 2x20 → 2x22 or 3x15 → 3x16 or 2x24 → 3x17 → etc. progressing up to 3x20/2x30 depending on the athlete. Having done a lot of SST extension work, you can probably skip the 10-12min stuff and dive right in to a 2x20 at 10W below threshold I would guess. (BTW 10W below threshold assumes someone in that 250-300W range, if your raw FTP number is lower, you can go more like 5… point is to be somewhat notably BELOW threshold rather than right at it or certainly not above it. I typically have people kind of ride by RPE. If you’re above threshold, right about that 12 min mark of an interval, you’ll know.)
Do over unders. 4 minutes at 90%. 1 minute at 120ish%.
Start with 3 × 15. Then do 4 × 15. Then 3 × 20. Then 3 × 25. You get the idea.
So you’re mostly pushing familiar SS watts, but with some challenge.
Enjoy!
ETA: Or do what @kurt.braeckel said. Depends on how ADHD you are 
Yeah that’s the Dean Golich approach, and it works well with experienced/well-trained riders for sure. If you’ve done progressions up to 60min at threshold and you’re revisiting “known territory”, you don’t need to be quite as conservative. When you’re pushing things, that’s when I take the slower approach.
Will do…thank you!!
There’s a “team sweet spot” you can join. That has a good library of workouts which progress TTE
Don’t see them - there are a few options, but mostly too complex. Having said that, I can’t find a team section on Intervals so may have missed it…
They were referring to this TR team with custom sweet spot workouts
I can’t access that any more as I’m not a subscriber.
I’ve since worked out the (actually remarkably easy!) Intervals workout builder though, so can knock up a session in a couple of minutes now 
Did you ever figure this out? I now have the same problem!
May not be the answer you’re looking for, or maybe I misunderstood the question, but intervals.icu has that already… that’s where @FergusYL got the table they copied here.
Were you replying to me? If so, thanks for the reply, but my question was about tracking time in SS zone during the ride on the Garmin, not after.
Yes, replying to you; and sorry, had misunderstood the question.
