daveryanwyoming said:Everybody's MMP curve is a bit different, but FWIW my 5 minute to FTP ratio in both last year and so far in this training year is roughly 86%.
Again the question comes up, have you specifically gone out and tried to put out a best effort for 5 minutes outdoors? A hard 5 minutes in the middle of a longer group ride isn't going to reflect your capabilities as you either are tired from the preceeding work, saving some energy for the rest of the ride or both.
I guess the roller based FTP test is valid as an estimate of what you can do on the rollers but I'd be very surprised if that reflects your FTP established outdoors under ideal conditions including sufficient: rest, warmup and motivation. FTP is defined to represent what you can do for ~ 1 hour under benign conditions as rmur17 likes to put it. Pulling a value from the middle of a long endurance ride or indoors while focusing on staying upright on the rollers without a resistance unit while spinning your brains out and without a lot of cooling hardly qualifies as benign conditions.
If it helps you set training levels then cool, it's useful as a representation of what you can do. But I suspect you're still selling yourself short in terms of FTP and simultaneously over estimating your TSS and CTL on the outdoor rides.
Are the outdoor rides pushing you to your limit occasionally? Do you get dropped and have to regroup after hard sections, especially longer climbs? If so I'd take a look at your histogram step down for the weekend rides and see what that tells you about FTP. But again, if you haven't pushed yourself hard and occaisionally too hard then it will still under estimate FTP.
Either way, your estimates are on the rise so you're moving in the right direction.
Stay with it, the numbers should keep getting better,
-Dave
No, I have not tried a 5m, 20m or 60m "best effort" ride outdoors. I guess the problem is a combination of logistics and motivation. The nearest place for me to do a proper "best effort" ride is far enough away that I wouldn't go out there just to do an interval, but am frequently out there on group rides. On fast group rides, I've got plenty of motivation, but as you note, I've both used energy before the effort and have to save some energy for the remainder of the ride.
Yes, the group rides tend to push me to the limit, as I do get dropped and have to regroup. As I get more of those rides recorded with power, I'll get a better histogram from which to guess at my FTP.
Thanks for the advice and encouragement. I found doing 1x20 @ 152 today only slightly more difficult than 1x20 @ 136 two weeks ago, and a big part of that improvement is simply from adapting to the 20m interval format (previously, all solo efforts had been recovery type rides, whether indoors or outdoors). I think I'll be able to continue increasing the interval efforts, and eventually hope to get within SST levels for my "true" FTP.
