Confronting, but it's OK

“We suggest to set your FTP to 298. Do you want to change your current FTP of 315 to 298?” These were approximately the words which I saw on my TrainerRoad screen after the 2x8 minute FTP test (basically the Carmichael protocol). Although it’s not a nice message it is reality at the moment. Last weeks training was terrible due to mentioned reasons (see previous posts). And I guess I just have to accept reality to adjust training levels as to be able to start building again instead of trying to pursue a level which I cannot maintain of even upgrade at the moment. I think it’s a good thing to adjust FTP and thus training levels down. Below you can see the Golden Cheetah graph.

 








In the first 8 minute effort I started too optimistic as you can see. I could only maintain the 362 watts for a short period of time and after that I just struggled to not go down too fast. This is a typical example of bad pacing. On average those 8 minutes came down to 336 watts (I did more in my last FTP test of 20 minutes a while ago…..). So knowing I blew up the first interval I tried to maintain 330 watts in the second interval. That you could say was a reasonable good example of pacing because I ended up with 329 . You can see HR data went a bit wrong in the second interval. Maybe I should get a new battery form my HR strap, I don’t know.

As said it’s confronting, but at the same time it’s reality, but I do put some hope out of it. As one of the wattage group members (Beth Leasure-Hudson) wrote:

“If you've decided to utilize and invest in a powermeter, then ignoring all of its information seems wasteful to me. FTP is not a datapoint for bragging rights. It is a datapoint that can yield very useful information about progression/regression, magnitude of change, and in conjunction with other datapoints, much more. Getting your baseline number may seem discouraging in the moment, but could be very encouraging over time. One thing that distinguishes very elite performers is the ability to objectify performance, and its measures such as FTP, and utilize the information to make effective changes. Get the datapoint and utilize it. Your feelings about the datapoint - good/bad/indifferent - can be controlled for your benefit, including as a motivation for improvement.”