I’m 145 pounds and was around 4.5 w/kg and got absolutely dropped by a 45 year old Jeremiah Bishop… Pros are just built different, lol
4 Likes
In my earlier post I mentioned that 1.7mi at 8.8% could be a 20 min sweetspot climb. If you had a 34x50 (say you got a hardtail) that would have you climbing around 80 RPM at the same power as 60 RPM in your current 35-36 low gear.
Just food for thought!
1 Like
Yeah for sure, it unloads for a little bit, makes the ride a bit more “stochastic” as well and just gives that shorter mental carrot. There’s a lot to like about them, and proof you don’t have to be a blue bar masochist to get quality work in. It’s just always funny in the post-ride comments when some of my athletes will say stuff like, “I know these are a little bit harder than a plain 2x20, but I just like them so much more.”… so we roll with it!
2 Likes
No change of cassette is going to give us low enough gearing when most of us have half the w/kg of a pro. The solution is smaller chainrings, I run a 40:28 mtb chainset on my gravel bike with an 11-32 cassette that means I can still spin up a local climb that averages almost 10% for over 2 miles. Sure I spin out 25mph on the slightest downhill and am tucking and coasting on proper downhills, but that’s not where I’m going to ship loads of time over a long ride.
1 Like
like @splash said you might want to invest in lower gearing for these types of rides. When I first got started, couldn’t hold more than about 10 minutes at any cadence. Personally I think cadence is trainable, based on my own results, but how much for you is unclear.
FWIW and this is really limited to 6 months in 2020 when I lifted heavy, my legs started to burn a lot earlier and it FELT (not sure) that it was capping my long power. As I understand it, one adaptation from sustained endurance training over years is that some develop more type 1 slow twitch muscle fibers, the fibers are bigger (or mitochondria is bigger?), and there is an increase in power output from solely using slow twitch muscle fibers. While I believe powerlifting develops more (???) fast twitch fibers, honestly not sure about that statement. And I’m an engineer not a physiologist, so that may not be correct. All I can say is that for myself, I’m seeing better results doing what StrongFirst labels as anti-glycolytic or A+A training with kettlebells - short explosive swings for 10 seconds and then 50 seconds rest. I’m also doing something vaguely similar with full-gas short power intervals. It seems to be working, but so is slowly increasing annual training hours. And when I got started, cramming as much intensity and 30-180 minute long intervals into those ~6 hours/week average. 
Anyways, losing weight may in fact drive higher W/kg than trying to raise FTP. And it is possible to do both IMHO, my personal preference when losing weight is to increase riding above 8 hours/week and burn more calories while making sure I get my macros. If I’m coming from lower volumes of say 5-7 hours/week, I don’t need to focus much on power the gains naturally start showing up after 3 months or so.
Again my personal experience, not saying those things will work for you.
1 Like
I have a couple of lower W/kg riders that like sportives and such with steep climbs in them, and I tell them it boils down to pacing, nutrition, and gearing. At least one of them was running around with the stock gears her bike came with, like 50-32, 11-25… so we got that sorted. Fully agree - put a dinner plate on the back, smaller chainrings, tuck the descents. Around here, I get by with 52-36/11-28 on my race set, but run a 34 in the back on my training set, and I’m 3.8-4.2W/kg given times of the year.
Not sure why that would matter.
The idea is to build these numbers, then easier endurance pace becomes relatively easier. Essentially, this is the principle behind reverse periodization. Build you shorter power, then stretch it.
Yes you did hit my point, quality over quantity. In the world of ‘no tradeoffs’, I would suggest increasing both intensity and volume. However, there are trade offs, so for a rider with a lower ftp, I’d suggest they focus on developing power under 20 mins. It is much easier to train to continuously ride for several hours than it is to, say, increase your 5 or 10min max avg power output by 5%.
I’m not knocking anyone with 3w/kg ftp or whatever. I’m just saying that if you have sustained power like that, you might find better progress trying to build that lower duration power then stretch it for longer rides at lower intensity.
He’s trying to do a hilly 120 miles. No amount of extra short power is going to help him sit on a bike for 8+ hours.
1 Like
Each hill requires short term power. You tend to ride easy inbetween hills. Riding the hills faster is what makes your ‘8hour’ ride a 6 hour ride. I think it’s great to just want to jump in to big rides, but to perform well takes a lot of ground work. People want to run the marathon after their first 5k. I’m saying stick to the basics and build your way up to it. The basics are good strength and power at 20min and below. Building the basic endurance to spin your legs for 6 hours in a row is the easy part. Just nobody wants to hear that, clearly.
Twenty minute power still isn’t going to help him with a 120 mile gravel ride. He already rides 5,000 miles per year. You haven’t convinced me that adding 20 watts to his 20 minute power is going to help on this ride. (And adding 19 watts to his FTP may be a tall order on current volume.)
He does need to pace it correctly and since he’s blowing uphalf way through, he obviously is not pacing it. He probably needs to do most of it in zone 2 and below, and keep the climbs under threshold power with the correct gearing. It doesn’t matter what his FTP is as long as he stays within his abilities.
3 Likes
My experience is long rides are a different beast. I get the whole concept of pushing up your FTP so your floor is now higher. What I always felt was lacking though when focusing on that aspect is I had crappy endurance. So it has me rethinking what I’m doing, do I push up my ftp so I can push I higher watts for a short amount of time or do I focus more on endurance and sprinkle in intervals. This way I can push higher watts at the end of a long ride, as opposed to barely holding on at the end, because I have crappy endurance. I’m also an average 10 hour a week rider. Those who are short on time don’t have much choice in my opinion.
Because you had trouble explaining the basis for your advice, and seemingly are ignore the fact W/kg is about ranking climbing ability and not about physiology.
At 2.88W/kg FTP, I hit a raw FTP of 275W and was able to hold it for over an hour. And 5-6 hour rides at .8 to .87 IF. People scoff at my when I say it, but I have the evidence.
My W/kg seemingly has nothing to do with:
- being able to hold FTP for roughly an hour
- being able to ride tempo up to 6 hours
Let me repeat back what I’ve read…
The first post states 90kg and 245W FTP (2.7W/kg), and that his first priority is losing weight to get some easy W/kg climbing gains. You appeared to seize on the 2.7W/kg as being the deciding factor on how to train. Apologies if I missed an earlier reply. Being sub-3W/kg you believe it is better to do workouts of 90 minutes or less, and more specifically to work on power under 20 minutes. Because “It is much easier to ride continuously for several hours than to increase 5 or 10 minute max power by 5%” which I’m struggling to understand what that has to do with being <3W/kg.
Color me confused.
Maybe that works really well for you? Thats another reason I asked if you train below an FTP of 3W/kg. But from your lack of response on that question, does that mean you are a good bit higher than 3W/kg?
As I understand it that principle is one of specificity, typically for triathletes or long distance specialists, to ‘raise the roof’ and do vo2max early because closer to your event you get more specific which looks like long tempo riding.
FWIW my 1-3 hour HC climbs got better when I focused on pushing out ability to ride tempo beyond 90 minutes. Eventually I pushed FTP out to around an hour, low threshold (.9 to .92 IF) for two hours, and tempo riding up to 6 hours. Personally I focused on both long power and short 30-90 sec power, those became two tent poles on short and long power, and all the stuff between 2 minutes and 2 hours got ‘pulled up’ by the two ends of a ‘string.’ Coaches might disagree with my 30-90 sec power focus, but ‘going long’ is pretty well established in training circles.
My recent experience is that more endurance and fewer intervals (7-8 hours/week average) pushed up my 3-to-30 minute power much higher than less volume (5-6 hours/week average) and more focus on ‘structure’ as defined by TR pre-AT. Honestly it was quite shocking how 2 months at 9-11 hours/week with a lot of ‘junk miles’ in November/December 2022, managed to push up my entire power curve by late January 2023.
Hope some of that is helpful to @RecoveryRider - the one thing I learned from TR podcast is that its good to experiment and find what works for you.
1 Like
OP shared in the opening post that they easily could have completed a ~130mi ride that was flat but totally blew up on the two climbs of the hilly race. I don’t think OP needs to continue to focus on being able to ride longer. OP needs to get better at riding hard.
he said this:
maybe I’m wrong, but those times, at that W/kg, didn’t sound like he was sweating it out at 85% ftp. And blowing up on climbs after 60 miles means he either went to hard and underfueled/hydrated on the first 60 miles, or something.
Losing weight and gearing are the low hanging fruit, and possibly the fueling/nutrition which is something you learn about yourself after doing enough long rides.
I’m all for training hard, but I’m not sure he needs to get better at training hard on shorter efforts.
@WindWarrior wrote the long post so I don’t have to. 
But his experience mirrors mine pretty much exactly. I’m 52, typically 93-96ish kg (and back to focusing on lots of weight loss - maybe this’ll be the year? 
) and was stuck at a 300 FTP for about three years focusing on heavily structured plans, then decided to go for volume using JOIN this year. Moving from 5-7 hours a week to 9-11 with the occasional 12+ brought me up to 319 mid summer, and I felt like I had plenty more to go before I had to drastically reduce my time on the time on the bike late summer because life.
In my experience, quality=quantity=quality. Figure out how many hours you can squeeze in without blowing up yourself or your life, then do as much intensity as you can recover from.
For me, that mostly means lots of fun rides around my house (Central VT, so it’s very hilly), two or three hard days a week until I start fatiguing, then do an easy week with just one hard day and some mellow rides. Riding lots for fun encourages more riding, so you get fitter, etc.
Sure, hitting a plateau is theoretically a possibility but I don’t think it’s really a concern for most 50+ riders with jobs, family, etc. who aren’t heavily focused on racing. There’s tons of room for us Clydesdales to grow in terms of raising FTP and pushing out TTE.
Edit: and post-edit, it is of course no longer a short post.
Edit: also, also, @RecoveryRider - what kind of drivetrain are you running? I switched to 1x this year (and freaking love it) but I used an 11-40 cassette with an Ultegra RX rear derailleur for a couple years (34/50 with 11-40) and it ran great. You might be able to squeeze in a bigger cassette than you think, which is great for rising more and longer with less fatigue over the long haul. It really is a game changer.
2 Likes
Pure speculation on the part of the OP. Not an actual data point.
1 Like
No it’ll go away just like DOMS after lifting until that went away. You’re not fit to it yet, I guess.
I like the polarized idea and I would suggest it. To me, polarized means doing maybe 2 hard workouts a week then riding easy or endurance (zone 2ish). No need to be obsessive about it, but hitting numbers on an intensity day workout is all that matters. Endurance is just filler. Don’t fail your workout because you’re living in the ‘grey zone’ riding your endurance mileage harder than you can recover from.
Coming from your fitness/ power lifting background, you should be used to structured training. Just stick to it. Getting your body weight down will be helpful, but that’s a long term thing that you accomplish in the kitchen, not on the bike. You could get your weight down eating riding and walking for exercise, so don’t get yourself in hole over doing it with riding.
That ride is pretty ambitious. Don’t be discouraged you bonked. Do a shorter distance next year, ride it fast and finish, then come back and do the 120 and do the same. That would be my recommendation. Goodluck
It’s not that no one wants to hear that. It’s that you’re describing a misconception about what reverse periodization is, and, in my opinion, giving incorrect advice on how to train that is based on, frankly, I have no idea what.
Reverse periodization is based on the principle of specificity. Race specific training for ultra events is a lot of tempo, high endurance, with bouts of threshold thrown in depending on the course. All of which is usually high volume for people with performance goals. You do higher power stuff earlier to spur certain adaptations (primarily aerobic), but I have never met a coach who would program reverse periodization for an ultra athlete and tell them not to ride more than 90 minutes.
Why?
Because aerobic adaptation takes a long time - months. Years. It’s not just about “spinning your legs for a long time.”
For this event you are training aerobically. In most of these ultra events if you go anaerobic much you are risking not finishing. A key component of aerobic training is volume. Your advice is neglecting that to the point of dismissing it entirely.
7 Likes
I think your comment has a positive intent but for larger riders I think this comment in uninformed, not useful and unintentionally rude.
For a rider that is 100kg that means you would have to have an ftp of 300w to justify a long ride?
Your point might be valid in some cases but there are a lot that it doesnt
There is a lot of great advice in this thread, pacing, gearing, weight loss and training are probably all of the key points I read through.
I want to add another point about mindset, whenever I’ve worked really hard at a goal and not done as much as I wanted or hoped I would be disappointed and loose focus and consistency. This always turns into regret for me. You just did a ton of work but man you have made a lot of progress, don’t get down on yourself keep going and take all this advice as next streps.
Well done for doing what you did! It’s way more than I did at that race
7 Likes