If yiu didn't ride a steady effort, I wouldn't take it.

You were highly motivated to ride harder than you normally would, that’s the challenge within a FTP test. I’d take NP for that ride as being pretty close to FTP.

Jeepers, that's even higher. Riding less, but harder seems to be helping my fitness. I've been busier with life and just ride an hour a day, mostly inside after cross season and I'm at 320 Watts at age 58, have not seen that in a while
Thanks Zwift.

I think the biggest question is if that's straight from an actual, dual-sided power meter.

A powertap on rollers

I've had some pretty flattering stats after a Zwift race, at first it was great, but now I'm a little skeptical. I did a 40km race this week and I averaged close to my FTP, I've been living on beer and mince pies for the last 2 weeks, so the result was inaccurate unless someone laced my mince pies with EPO. If I ride solo or on a TT bike, average power is accurate, in a group, then it's always unrealistically higher.

I’d guess it’s valid.

Try reverse engineering it: do a max 20’ at 1.05 x that power.

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I have noticed that too. If I ride harder and skip a day or two, on repeat, I get stronger quicker. If I want more endurance then I have to ride more often but less power. I would recommend you try some intervals at your new FTP and see how it feels. You might be physically ready but not mentally ready for that number. Or the opposite. Or you might nail it and then you should accept it.

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May or may not be accurate. Zwift just takes 95% of your best 20 minute power. So if that was your first 20 minutes, I would not think that would be accurate. The proper 20 minute test needs a hard couple minutes before the test.

On the other hand, Zwift can really motivate you and maybe you are stronger than you thought, just needed the motivation. I would look at the NP for the entire ride, how close was that to the FTP? What was the average power of the race?

I agree with the other posters that have said you should try some intervals using a higher FTP and see how they go.

Fitness is a tricky term.

FTP and VO2 Max? I'm positive your methods can improve them and that's really useful.

But for the longer stuff like Ironmans you also have to focus on endurance and look at things like sustainable percent of FTP, which for me are more indicative of my goal fitness simply because those races are my goals.

One is no better than the other, but highest FTP doesn't always win the long race. Short one probably though, all else aero-equal.

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I would say to do the Zwift ramp test to validate those numbers but I don't think you can do that on rollers.

I used the 20 minute protocol in the past, it seed to work fine. I have a tugboat power curve and score worse on the to tests

What do you mean by valid? Do you mean, does it represent MLSS? I think unfortunately that’s a maybe yes, maybe no.

But what do you want to use it for? If you can look at your power duration curve, you don’t need FTP to figure out power targets for intervals. FTP and “zones” might have been the most useful thing at one point, but nowadays it’s just a datum. Pretty much every training platform nowadays shows you your PDC, or a version of it.

And if you’re curious because you want to see whether you got faster, we’ll, you already know that you did :)

I guess it's the last one. I don't exactly have a scientific training plan I'm just jumping in the races a couple of times a week and going somewhat hard. So I guess good news I'm getting in better shape.