I must be missing something too! I'm with JustinD. I'm about 3.6w/kg right now and there is NO WAY I could go 55mins for a 40k. Was there a tail wind?
How much do you weigh? Is your weight higher than mine equating to a much higher overall wattage? On a flat course w/kg doesn't matter as much. At 245W I'm at 3.6w/kg

But hey, you do a group ride once in a while with some Cat 1's and 2's (as though guys who are racing cat 4 don't)... :-)

Weight is a big part of the picture - at 90kg 3w/kg is ok power. But aero is the main part of the equation here and I do a lot better on that. The winds on that day added ~1min. Tom A and RChung have given plenty of advice you can use for self improvement on aero - which is the only way to get significant gains.

That's why some of these people with relatively low W/Kg figures can go so well on the bike. The bigger guys will have more absolute power to play with, so if they are reasonably aero, they'll kill a little 135 lb 5W/Kg pipsqueak. But remember, in triathlon...those big guys then have to haul their 180+ lbs around a run course. There are very few fast big guy runners out there.

Do you have any pics of your legs at top/bottom of the pedal stroke? It appears to me that your hip angle is severely closed and you may benefit from raising your set and/or getting shorter cranks.

At the last road race I did down here there was *almost* a crash cause we rode past a tree, 2 miles later there was a crash because there was a palm tree leaf in the gutter

'bad' weather is ...

Given that you rode strongly at Rotorua and say you can sustain a high proportion of FTP for a long time - I suspect that you haven't done yourself justice with your ftp testing. Looking at your position I'd have expected a 3w/kg just to ride your IM time.

Thanks for the feedback. Did you mean 3w/kg during the IM, or 3w/kg FTP?

Next time I'll test my FTP at the bike track rather than on my indoor trainer, that will take me overheating and possible non zeroing of the Powertap out of the equation.

Are you still doing bike fitting? If so, do you do mountain bike fitting?

Let's do some figgerin'...

The average healthy but sedentary, college-aged male has a VO2max of approximately 45 mL/min/kg. However, I have seen it argued based on studies of, e.g., aboriginal tribes (and there are population data from Europe as well as military inductees here in the US to suppor the conclusion) that the "default" VO2max of the average human male is closer to 50 mL/min/kg, and the only way to get below this is to assume a couch-potato lifestyle, gain excess weight, etc. (and/or grow old, of course). So, I'll go with that latter number.

With short-term training, VO2max increases by 15-25% on average, with another perhaps 5-10% possible (on average, anyway) with more prolonged and/or intense training. That gives a total increase of 20-35%, so I'll go with 30% just for argument's sake.

So, if VO2max is, on average, 50 mL/min/kg and increases by, on average, 30%, that means that the average Joe ought to be able to raise their VO2max to about 65 mL/min/kg with training. Indeed, there are many, many, many, MANY amateur endurance athletes with VO2max values of around that number (not to mention the fact that athletes in team sports with an endurance component - e.g., soccer - often have a VO2max of around 60 mL/min/kg, something that is also true in other sports that you don't normally consider to be of an endurance nature, e.g., downhill skiing or motocross - i.e., motorcycle - racing).

The question then becomes, how high might functional threshold power fall as a percentage of VO2max (again, on average), and what does this translate to in terms of a power output? The answer to the former is about 80% (LT, on average, being about 75% of VO2max in trained cyclists), which means that in terms of O2 consumption, a functional threshold power corresponding to a VO2 of 65 mL/min/kg * 0.80 = 52 mL/min/kg could be considered average. If you then assume an average cycling economy of 0.075 W/min/kg per mL/min/kg, this equates to...

3.9 W/kg

I would agree with you that it does take a very lean "larger" athlete to achieve 4.0w/kg, but the smaller guys can usually get there fairly easily with some consistant dedicated training. Im 6'2" and ~170 so I am really happy when I reach 4.2-4.3. Mostly this is because I am that light, which means I'll climb better and run better. There are a lot of kids who just get a little training in and they are at 5.0w/kg because they weigh 135lbs.

But I feel the most important thing is aerodynamics (W/CdA) for bike performance in triathlon. I have rolled a 53:xx 40k at 300w on an aluminum bike with tufos for tires (if I only would have run vittorias). I don't understand why guys focus so much w/kg in triathlon. Most tris have limited climbing on the bike anyway. The most that I have had is 1500' and I was still right about an hour.

What about the average Joe-womens?