devolikewhoa83 wrote:
Rock, good job. What was your aerobic training like in order to get there, on a week by week basis? Did you do that thing where you ride the bike with a given heart rate, until it starts to drift, and then drop the power? And then each ride, see if you can push it further and further before it drops?
Or did you rather simply program longer and longer rides, not really using in-the-moment biofeedback to dial it in?
The endurance piece is really my weak point and what i'm looking to work on this year. I've got good power in the 5 to 30 minute range and i can do numerous above threshold efforts and recover well, but if i, for example, go out to do a ride with 50 minutes in zone 3 "tempo," 20 minutes into it by heart rate will be knocking on the door of threshold, and it is VERY taxing on me the next day . . .
I'm not a triathlete but i figure, triathletes are probably the best people from whom to learn about this particular piece :)
It's funny, when I posted up here what I did for training I got criticized on here by some. I came from a bike racing background so that shaped a lot of my bike training philosophy. It sounds simple, but really I just trained specific to the demands of the event. So on the bike I did mid week rides of 90 min, with blocks of 45 min - 1hr straight at half IM power. For my long ride, I was doing rides of 3.5 to 4 hours every weekend, and closer to the event I did a total of 4 x 5hr rides. My long rides had large chunks of time at IM power target, and often the whole ride would be at IM power target. So I did a lot of riding at power similar to what I would be racing at, and I did a few rides each week with blocks of time at power slightly higher than what I would be racing at. Training was all based off a power target, but adjusted on the fly depending on what HR and/or RPE was doing. E.g. earlier on during long rides I would do blocks of 1 hour at IM power, which was what I could sustain before getting some reasonable HR and RPE drift. As I got fitter, I could do longer and longer blocks at target power without getting the drift. So basically a very simple progressive overload approach.
One thing to watch though, is that by focusing on longer aerobic type intervals, my 5 min and 1 min power really dropped off. So if you're bike racing predominantly, I would make a focus of 20 min power and below. I was told years ago by a very experienced bike racer that in bike racing your FTP determines what grade/category/level you race at, and your 5 min/1min power determines if you'll win. I know it's a very simple way of looking at things, but I think that it's actually very accurate for the majority of bike races us amateurs do.