It Hasn't Killed Me After All...but

zaskar

It depends on the goals and demands of a particular race you are preparing for. 2x20 are great but you have to mix things up. If that is all you do, that is all you will get out of it. 2x20 wont make you the fastest 100 mile racer / rider in town. You go hard for 40 min and the race is 4 hours, you very well may have problems once you start burning matches.

To bring up my FTP, I had to up the L4 time to 3 hours ( 90% effort ). Then threw in some L5-6. You have to be willing to suffer a little to achieve a higher fitness. L4 are not exactly a suffer fest once you get use to them. After you get use to doing 30 min of L5, 100% L4 are cake for an hour. Just speaking from my experience. What works for me , may not for the other guy.

NomadVW

The purpose of 2x20's or any workout designed to improve functional threshold is not designed to improve endurance. For that you have to work the endurance systems. 2x20's, 3x20's or sweet spot training, or your pick of the poison is only a small part of the recipe.

If you're trying to cook up success for a longer distance road race, you're going to have to add more ingredients on the aerobic level - which means ride longer distances in the L1/L2 (coggan) ranges. This will help your body become more efficient at using its energy on longer distances.

If all you ever do is work your aerobic system for an hour, at the end of an hour you're going to start feeling the pain.

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wiredued

From 2005 thru 2006 I was Mr Endurance pace about 10 hours per week my 90 mile avg speed was low 13ish mph on rolling hills my FTP was about 211 watts. Since October 2006 I have been Mr 91-100%FTP 3x20min about 3hours per week my 90 mile avg speed is 15.4mph on rolling hills my FTP is 252 watts. I'm sure it could be better if I mixed it up a bit but 20 minutes of L4 is worth 2 hours of L2 IMHO.

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zaskar

I would think he would be better off skipping L1- L2. If he could build up to 2 and a half to 3 hours of SST or L3, L1 L2 would be a gimmie??

daveryanwyoming

Yep, that's how I see it. Or more specifically I don't schedule the L1/L2 work(except perhaps for active rest days) but end up getting quite a bit of it while targeting higher level workouts. I really only schedule L3 and above for workouts but at the end of the week I still end up with plenty of L1/L2 time gathered as warmups, cooldowns and between harder efforts. I still tend to block my L3 work although I try for 45 minute to hour and a half blocks or whatever the roads, long climbs and traffic conditions allow. Then I take a mental break getting to the next climb, the next long stretch of road, etc and all that adds up to L1/L2 time on the bike.

I agree with all the folks that say you shouldn't target 100 mile races with 2x20's alone, but it's still the core of my schedule with L3/SST forming the endurance component. Sure I get plenty of L1/L2 if you look at power distributions over the training week, perhaps 40% of my time is spent in those levels but they're never the target workout for the day.
There's some truth to that, but not as much as you might think. Your FTP is still the best predictor of your performance at those longer distances, push that up higher and you'll be working at a lower percentage of FTP during your long rides, buring more stored fat than glycogen and overall working easier and more efficiently. But the longer rides in the weekly schedule do help you get used to being on the saddle for longer periods and help train your muscles to store more glycogen which pays off on long rides. Nutrition definitely plays a part in longer rides, but that's more a matter of discipline than training although the occasional long ride lets you fine tune your feeding strategy. Remember to start eating and drinking early in long rides and races if you want to do well at the end. It's easy to get caught up in the action and forget to eat or drink for the first hour or more and that will hurt you later in a long ride.

Anyway, I'm a huge fan of SST and L4 work as you probably know from my other posts but that doesn't mean I ignore longer L3 rides as a means to build endurance and CTL. But all the endurance in the world won't help in a race if your FTP and VO2max isn't high enough to weather the crunch times or hold pace with the leaders. It's a question of balancing the need for power with the need for endurance and fitting it all into a weekly schedule that still lets you recover. That's the art of this whole thing and it isn't the same for any two riders.

Good luck,
Dave

acoggan

But LT - or your effort relative to your LT - is the primary determinant of your "endurance".

More generally: the purpose of any workout (2 x 20 min at level 4 included) is to induce specific physiological adaptations that benefit your performance on race day. In this context, specificity is a very important principle, but it is a mistake to apply it too literally w/ respect to training intensity/duration.

NomadVW

If this was the case, then everyone's power would drop equally once they hit an hour on the bike if they went at x% of effort. I understand what you mean and understand that raising one's FTP will inevitably raise one's power at ranges beyond one hour. However, there is more to increasing power at an hour and a half, two hours and more than raising threshold. This seems to be the dilemma posed by our challenge to 2x20's.

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daveryanwyoming

I don't follow your logic here.

Everyone's CP curve is a bit different with different contributions from AWC and CP itself. So even if two riders rode side by side at say 80% of their respective FTPs (which would have to be very close to one another unless their CdA, weight or rolling resistance was dramatically different or they wouldn't stay side by side for long) for an hour one rider might have less of an AWC contribution to hour power and do better at an hour and twenty or two hours or longer. Still both riders would benefit by raising their FTP as it would mean riding at a lower percentage like 75% or 70%.

I'm not arguing in terms of needing some longer rides to handle longer races, but it still seems like raising FTP is the best bang for your buck as it allows you to work at a lower IF for the same speed which means burning more fat and preserving more of your limited glycogen stores. That won't get your butt used to sitting in the saddle or teach you to feed yourself on a long ride nor will it build the highest CTL but it still seems like the starting point for everything else.

-Dave

NomadVW

We agree.

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dome

It is often stated that FTP is the best indicator for performance in endurance events. Does the quote mean that ones power at a longer duration than 1hr would be a better indicator?

Alex Simmons

Well as Andy has often remarked, "the best predictor of performance is performance itself".

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acoggan

"Lactate threshold is the most important physiological determinant of endurance performance ability." - A. Coggan

(Note to the world at large: I tend to choose my words quite carefully.)

acoggan

Your statement does not logically follow from what I wrote.



Sure - but on the whole it is easier to raise the entire power-duration curve than it is to flatten it, plus the training that you do to raise it tends to flatten it anyway. So, rather than thinking in terms of "I need to train X hours in order to be able to race X hours", you're better off thinking of it in terms of "I need to do the appropriate amount of training at the appropriate intensities (note the use of the plural) that will induce the physiological adaptations that will most benefit my race performance". Does that mean that you can ride multi-day stage races while only training ~1 h/d? Probably not...but it also means that you don't have to train for many hours a day, day-in and day-out (at a necessarily lower intensity), to prepare for such events.

wiredued

Thought provoking jam packed zip file statement

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