Another bump in FTP!

I need to spend more time here, working hard.

In early October I re-tested my FTP (functional threshold power) to see what gains I have been making on the bike trainer. It didn’t go well.

It started off feeling really hard and I knew right away it wasn’t going to be pretty. I couldn’t keep up with the wattage targets and was at failure much earlier than I would have liked or expected. The suggested new target afterward was lower than the previous by 5 points, so I declined it.

I’m not sure why it was such a dud – it had been a weird week of family in town and then a college football homecoming game, so my schedule was a bit off. I don’t remember my eating or sleeping being particularly bad in the few days before except for general not sleeping enough during the week and life stress. I had run the day before, but it was nothing too strenuous. It was probably just a bad day.

So, earlier in November, about 3.5 weeks after the first test, I tried again. This time the trainer gods smiled down upon me. I could tell from the beginning that it was going to be a good test, and I was able to keep increasing my effort for far longer than the time before. In the end, I had a new, shiny FTP a full 4.9% higher than my last successful test in mid-August. Woo hoo! I had been expecting only an incremental gain (my last two increases were 2-3%) so I was pretty stoked to see such a jump.

… That is, of course, until my next two rides when I actually had to try to sustain something close to that new power goal. One of my go-tos on Trainer Road is Gilbert, during which you ride steadily for 5 minutes just below FTP, then increase for 5 minutes, then recover, for four intervals. This time around, I had to take a break halfway through every 10-minute interval. But that’s OK, because the next time I do this, I hope to have improved to the point where I can take no breaks, or at least get a few minutes into the increase before I have to dial it back.

If nothing else, this was a reminder that progress may not be linear all the time, but forward is still forward. If you keep working hard, you’ll probably get better – what a concept! I want to test one more time before the end of the year to see if I can get a little better with some more hard work. In the meantime, it's all about putting in the time and effort to keep increasing the engine.