Progress

I first got my powermeter in early March, and finding FTP was not exactly easy for me. Sure, I found my 5", 1' and 5' power easy enough, but something just didn't work with the FTP methods I tried. The first problem is you need fresh legs, but any training plan will tell you that doesn't happen more than once or twice a week for any training plan. That meant I had about one shot a week to test without sacrafising the remainder of the week. The second, bigger problem was the myriad of ways to find it.

At it's basic definition FTP is your maximum 60 minute power, but I'd never ridden the same power level for more than 5 minutes so an hour long time trial was out of the question. Instead, I tried the 1', 5', 20' test recommended by "Training and Racing with a Powermeter". The problem was the 1' shelled me so badly I could barely complete the 5' test and had nothing left for the 20'. Then one day I had a great hour long ride with a normalized power of 255 watts and thought "great! 255 it is!". Not so fast, as the NP alogorythm can easily be tricked into overcalculating wattage. Of course you can't really tell the extent, but this was clearly an overestimation. I "conservatively" estimated my FTP at 240 and went about training from there. Question answered, done deal, right?

Nope.

Fastforward two months and I find the Monod Critical Power excel spreadsheet over at the wattage forms. It uses formulae to describe how your power curve declines with time. Using two samples of maximum power for durations between one and twenty minutes, I can calculate FTP at any time in my training, as long as they're within a week or so of each other. Pretty neat huh?

Using it with current data, I get an FTP of 245 which makes sense based on yet another FTP test by Carmichael (0.88 * 2x8' power average). That means a 5 watt increase after 2 solid months of training? I don't think that sounds right.

So playing with the numbers from the end of March and early April, I find an FTP of 233. That means in one month I've raised my FTP approximately 10 to 12 watts beacuse this is fairly theoretical. That's more than 2 watts increase per week!

This is exactly the kind of thing that motivates me; measurable effort and measurable reward. I think it's from all the years studying engineering, chasing grades on every single effort made in school. It's also exactly what got me addicted to an MMORPG years ago, playing 8-12 hours a day at the peak of my addiction. I would do the same monotonous action over and over, gaining experience, money and levels. The important part was seeing the progression, and when I got to the point in the game where that progression became mind numbingly slower, I quit.

The problem with cycling is you can't play 12 hours a day, your body just won't let you. I know there will be a point where my power numbers will progress much slower, and I wonder what my reaction will be. I think I'll stick with it, because there's so much more to riding than just power; the scenery, the feeling of flying, the friends, the races, etc.