long ride power

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I know I have relatively good endurance compared to my sprint and short term power but how long should it be possible to maintain level 3/tempo power? I did my first very long ride this week - 5 hrs, i ahve done a few 4hour rides so far this winter but nothing as long. for this ride my ave power was 213w and np 229w, accordign to CP my tempo range is 213-254w. FTP is from a critical power test on a Lode ergometer. should it be possible to put out that sort of power for that long? or do i need to re-test my ftp?

I know I have relatively good endurance compared to my sprint and short term power but how long should it be possible to maintain level 3/tempo power? I did my first very long ride this week - 5 hrs, i ahve done a few 4hour rides so far this winter but nothing as long. for this ride my ave power was 213w and np 229w, accordign to CP my tempo range is 213-254w. FTP is from a critical power test on a Lode ergometer. should it be possible to put out that sort of power for that long? or do i need to re-test my ftp?If you're well rested, well fueled and highly motivated it's not that hard to ride solid Tempo for several hours. Five hours seems long unless your CTL is also quite high(IOW, you've got a lot of training base). But I'd guess you're underestimating your FTP and your ride was closer to L2 endurance work for 5 hours.

A lot of folks struggle to put out the same power indoors as out. So if you tested FTP indoors as you've indicated and the 5 hour ride was outdoors it's quite likely you're FTP is higher than you think and your 213 AP is L2 for you. If you use the Performance Manager in WKO+ to track CTL, ATL and TSB then you want a fairly accurate estimate of your FTP. If not it doesn't really matter that much as long as you do your longer SST intervals sufficiently hard which most competitive folks tend to do anyway.

If a lot of your training is going to be outdoors then I'd do another FTP test outdoors. If you'll mostly train indoors then I'd stay with your current estimate and bump it up as your long training intervals get easier or rise in power.

Good luck,
Dave

I know I have relatively good endurance compared to my sprint and short term power but how long should it be possible to maintain level 3/tempo power? I did my first very long ride this week - 5 hrs, i ahve done a few 4hour rides so far this winter but nothing as long. for this ride my ave power was 213w and np 229w, accordign to CP my tempo range is 213-254w. FTP is from a critical power test on a Lode ergometer. should it be possible to put out that sort of power for that long? or do i need to re-test my ftp?
FWIW, I did a 5.5 hr solo ride at the end of September in which I averaged just 2 w less than the bottom of my tempo range. NP was ~81% of my FTP for the best 5 hrs.

The meat of the ride was just 3 hrs @ 85% NP (80% AP), with a 1.25 hr "commute" to and from the good roads.

CTL was 77, and tsb was actually fairly negative from a pretty hard week's training. There was also quite alot of climbing - for here anyway, a few long and steep climbs, so maybe that skewed it, i ceertainly slowed at the end but that was probably due to not eating enough earlier on, i felt much better once i did.the critical power test was about a month ago, so maybe i'll try to retest soon, 2x20s at 285 are still feeling quite hard at the end of the 2nd though.

1. Everyone has a different power-duration curve (but they all go one way)

2. Depends what you're training for and what training you are/have been doing

3. L3 is great for lots of things but eventually it's positive impact on FTP plateaus, so more work at higher power/shorter durations may be needed to continue with gains (and/or an opportunity to recover from a lot of built up fatigue if CTL is very high).