Fred D Mentor Group - Part II (Page 7)

Ha, I just read this comment on ST about the IMMT bike course.

"As for spinning up the steeper grades on Duplessis, it really is not possible unless you bring a 34x32 and you probably need an FTP of 4.5W per kilo to truly "spin".....pretty well everyone will be cranking at low RPM. "

If accurate, that pretty much guarantees I'll be going over the 210-215 watts range for some of the hills.  

The last round of testing I did put me at 260.  I did a TT in May where I held 271 for 31 mins.

Yeah, Rudy - sounds like you turned out to be the charity....LOL.

crazy how some rides can go like that - too bad you did not get the 125 in - I remember a while back you posting that and I thought it was pretty cool. Will you have a chance to give it a whirl again before the century season is over?

You can put NP on the display for both the Garmin 800 and Joule 2.0.  IMO it is better than average power because it'll come out slightly higher on a hilly course.  Which means you're less likely to be chasing your number.

Oh yeah, I have my Garmin set to auto-lap every 18 km (so probably more in the 35 min range) and I set the main data screen that I look at to lap data only.  3s and 30s power, lap AP, lap time and lap distance.  I'm going to try really hard to not worry about speed or what my total time will be (although I will calculate it in my head, I can't help it.....).  If I really want to know those numbers, I have to switch to another summary screen.

I have at least 3 screens

1) Power screen - I have NP, Lap power (autolap every 15km), 10s power, grade, cadence, HR, time and distance. This is the screen I have on 99% of the time. I like to have grade on there. When it hits 5% I feel less guilty sitting up :-)

2) HR screen- Current HR, lap HR and Average HR. Sometimes I will pace by HR and use this screen, but very seldom

3) Overral screen - NP for ride, Average power for ride, distance, time, avg speed, total ascent, total descent, temperature.

With the 500 upgrade I got 2 more screens. On one I put NP for the ride, AP for the ride, intensity and TSS. A 180 total TSS for the HIM bike is perfect for me. So 30 per 15km lap.

I spend most of my time on the power screen, trying to keep NP and AP as close as possible. I calculate my VI in my head, but like to be below 5%

Ha, Fred - it is a lot higher than MOST others suggest you are right to be suspect - I sure was when my coach suggested that I give it a whirl back in December based on some of my longer harder efforts on the bike and run. For some reason I do not suffer from any cardiac drift over long hard sub-maximal efforts - I seem to be a bit of an outlier in that regard (but again I have zero explosive ability). Just years and years of 100+ mile hard riding with folks way faster than me I suppose.

One of the problems with IM racing is you do not get a whole lot of chances to get real race data thoug - if you have an equipment failure during the race (in my case it was my PM) then it can be a year or more before you can try again. Since my PM was not working at LP I can only make power inferences from RPE and HR bracketed against training. My guess based on those two things is that I averaged at or slightly above 80% effort for the entire bike. Like you note this is a good bit harder than generally reccomended, but I knew I was going to have a pretty crummy run no matter what due to lack of lack of run-specific training this summer, so I figured it was a good opportunity to try it. It seemed to work for me as My legs felt OK coming off the bike. My feet were another issue entirely.

Curious, for you HR, do you use your actual heart rate or your Zone?  ie, 146 bpm vs Zone 3.2.  I'm using the 910xt and have the option of either.

I show my HR. I am more used to it, that's all.

Not sure how much you weigh or what gearing you will use but you may have trouble capping on some of those hills towards the end. I have a compact, 11-28 on the back and I was pushing in excess of 300 to get up some segments. No choice. It was that or fall over at a cadence of 10 :-)

Everything I read is that exceeding FTP even for short periods is bad.

Great post by a very smart man here :

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=3819592;page=1;mh=-1;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC

How much do you weigh?  And how long were you above 300?

When riding or racing, I mainly use one screen.  Speed, Power (1 sec), HR, Distance, Avg Power, Avg Speed.

On the secondary screen (mostly used during training), I show total ascent, time of day, temperature, normalized power, avg HR, total ride time.

I agree that NP is inflated.

Agree.  Good article btw.  When I said I go over, keep in mind that's very brief and course-dependent.  I have a good example from training this weekend:

http://app.strava.com/rides/15417549

Click the Performance tab and check power on my ride.  My CP at the moment is about 220.  You'll see I was mostly over threshold for the first 45 minutes or so.  Then almost no power for the next 12 due to a somewhat technical descent.  The rest of the ride I was able to hang in just a hair below threshold (keep in mind this was a 2 hour ride).

I didn't burn all my W' and I got 12 minutes of NO pedaling - compare that to the 26 minutes he mentions in that article.  In a nutshell, if I know I'm going to get a recovery on certain descents, I will strategically burn a match or two on the bike course.  Maybe not for everyone, but it's just what I'm comfortable with.

Edit: I certainly wouldn't go that far over threshold and that duration in an IM.  But small amounts yes.

I was 172lbs when I did it.

For the Duplessiis section if I go into Golden Cheetah, I see I went over 300 watts

for 30 seconds  10 times

45 seconds 5 times

For  1 minute 4 times

For 90 seconds 1 time

This is for each pass of Duplessis which is the last part of the course, which you will do twice.

Thanks for all the posts/inspires everyone - I'll get an RR up in the next day or so.  I don't think it could of gone any better.

Okay, a couple of you have listed that you believe NP is over inflated.  I'm trying to figure out why.  I got rid of the zeros in my avg power (have no NP on the CPU) so it was closer to NP.  I find that this number is easier to chase, especailly when riding hilly/rolling routes - and I understood NP to be a much better indicator than avg power.

As for Fred's question, I can't really give an answer for IM, but for HIM I'm planning to cap efforts at 100% FTP for the hills, and any of the slightly longer hills then I'll keep the efort around 90%.  At least that's the plan right now.