The TEAM CORE Chat Forum

Hi Paulo
Was planning on riding Busso at an IF of .9, as I did in Singapore. But as this course is super flat, is it fine to go by IF and NP instead of avg power.

Mikey

Hi Mike

Personally, whilst I keep an eye on average power, I would never actively ride to it on a course of any terrain. Yes, the difference (or Variability Index - shown on Cycling Peaks as a "V.I" value) will be very marginal between NP and average power at Busselton. However, I'd always suggest going with NP as it accounts for the physiological impact of an effort much more accurately than average power.

Again, personally I wouldn't ride to IF either. IF is calculated as a fraction of your FTP that you are holding for the effort, i.e. if your FTP was 300w and your NP was on 275w, your ergomo would show an IF of 0.916667*. Rather than confusing yourself with integers, know that IF and NP are one and the same, with NP being easier to read given that you have a whole number to look at. Knowing your target wattage range in watts rather than as a fraction of your FTP is much more simple to understand.

In any case though, I'd be pushing you more towards an IF range of 0.80 to 0.85 for Busso - I think you'll cook yourself at 0.90 to be honest! And if you think you can hold 0.90, I'd suggest that you need to look at re-testing your FTP to make sure that the numbers you are basing your race plan on are accurate to begin with and not too low.

Hope that helps!

Paul

Thanks Paulo
Held it reasonably comfortably on Sunday and then ran well off the bike for 16km. But I'll re test the threshold next week sometime. Can't imagine its gone up again.
Mikey

90% FTP is really very high for a ½IM. If you held it comfortably then my money's on an increase in FTP ...

Can I presume here that looking at your NP over avg power is only applicable to racing and not training rides?

For all my long IM specific training rides I constantly keep an eye on avg power, I do this in two ways,

1) My watts display is averaged over 10 secs, this smooths out the reading considerably I always try to keep this in the correct interval zone range.
2) I use the interval function to break the ride into prescribed intervals. i.e. first and last portion in z2 and middle portion in z3. I regularly check the avg power for the interval.

When I download my data I always judge the quality of the ride based on how close my vi is to 1.00, obviously I also want to make sure the power output for each interval is as close as possible to the middle of the zone I am training in.
This in practical terms means I have very little soft pedalling, but I don’t trash myself uphill.
The only exception to this in racing is that I soft pedal on steep down hill’s to conserve energy

Am I right or am I mad?
Tony

Tony,

I think you've got it spot on - that's the ideal way to do it in training.

One of the attractions of NP when racing is that ergomo gives it 'on the fly' so you can monitor your effort during the ride. This is very handy on hilly courses but it's perfectly possible to judge pace on flatter courses just by targeting certain watts as you have been in training.

Adam

Alrighty the 20min Time trial have be done and FTP is quite a bit higher than last time (about a month ago), a nice little suprise.

Its too late to do another race simulation to see if I can hold an IF of 0.9 (of new FTP) over 90km and run well off the bike. So I'll stick with the ranges from Paulo spreadsheet 0.8 - 0.85.

Thanks for the imput
Mikey

Chaps, its worth pointing out here that at a shade under 80kgs, Mike actually knocked out a staggering 416 watts for the 20 min effort!!! Now there's something to aim for!

Paul