Starting Again

My plan was to increase my FTP w/kg to around 2.5. I wanted to start with an accurate FTP test, then begin a program. Losing 10% body weight and gaining 10% FTP would improve my w/kg 22% and I would be close to my target and hopefully a podium shot in a D race.

Losing 10% weight +	Increase FTP 10% =	Increase w/kg 22%
100kg -> 90kg	200w -> 220w	2.0w/kg -> 2.44w/kg

So the day after the fateful Crit Race I wrote about in Part 1, I decided I needed to devise a plan to get quicker in a more structured and formulated fashion. With extra motivation, determination, and purpose, I went into my pain cave*, wrote the blog piece for Eric, hit send, crossed my fingers, and left without ever touching the bike. I wanted to do a new FTP Ramp test, and I knew I needed to be fresh for the best result.

* In my case, by “cave” I mean spare bedroom and by “pain” I mean it’s a painfully poor set up, more on this another time.

The day after blog day I was ready. I knew from my previous Ramp Test that it’s as much about the mind as it is about the body, I really had to force myself to keep going during the last few seconds as my legs ground to a halt. I wonder how much variation there is from riders with similar fitness who just refuse to quit, and those that stop too early. Does the test expect you to quit early and compensate? I certainly feel my FTP is generous, I doubt I could hold it for a full hour. I ended up pushing a maximum of 311 watts which seems very low, but with cumulative effort and tired legs at that point, my cadence had dropped to a slow pitiful crawl.

The last time I did an FTP Test I scored 196, this was November 2019 when I was weighing close to 118kg, or 1.66 w/kg. After this, I did the 6 week FTP builder plan. I presume this made me fitter, but I honestly have no idea how effective it was as I didn’t retest myself at the end. Instead I got married, enjoyed Christmas, ate far too much on our honeymoon in Italy eating pasta and pizza, and didn’t cycle again consistently until the start of April. I considered hiring an Uber bike one day to get around Rome but the unfamiliar road markings and driving on the right put me off, plus riding an electric bike still makes me feel like a fraud. Prior to the honeymoon I had dropped weight though via an experiment with Intermittent Fasting, getting as low as 102kg, and over the course of April, Zwift had generously estimated that my FTP had gone up to 202. This gave me a 1.98 w/kg FTP which is what was written in my Zwift profile when I raced Crit City at the start of May.

My retesting day yielded some mixed results. Firstly, my weight was no longer 102kg, the honeymoon had not been kind to the scales. I was now tipping 109kg, which set me back to 1.85 w/kg, and after consultation with WADA, also disqualified me from the Crit City race result completely for weight doping. Ooops!!! I avoided a ban for being honest, plus there was no evidence to prove I had benefitted from the deception in anyway. I was slow even when cheating.

Secondly, my new FTP came in at 217, so a new high of 1.99 w/kg. A net gain of 0.01 w/kg, small victories! This is where I considered the fact that Zwift thinks I can hold 217 watts for an hour. I doubt I could hold 155 for a full hour, so unsure what maths or witchcraft they are using. At the very least, even if the FTP is not accurate to a real life 1-hour effort, the Ramp Test offers a consistent method of checking progress, provided you’re also consistently tenacious.

So my new initial targets are as follows:

Losing 10% weight +	Increase FTP 10% =	Increase w/kg 23%
109kg -> 98.1kg	200w -> 239w	1.98w/kg -> 2.43w/kg

The Plan

I’ve had lots of tips about the best ways to increase FTP, and I have not ignored any of them. They are all very sound suggestions and I plan to try every one of them later on to see which ones possess the best pain to progress ratio. The reason I haven’t listened yet is I was already into week 4 of a 6-week FTP builder by the time my post went live. I’m determined to finish it to have an idea of how much improvement it can offer at my level of both fitness and commitment. As with all training, you only get out what you put in, and with the effort I’ve been putting in so far I’m expecting a spot on the Ineos roster. Domestique will do for the first year.

My first gripe about this plan is that it, and presumably all others, run from Monday to Sunday. Sessions are drip fed depending on when you do the previous one and it won’t let you complete multiple sessions on the same day for example. As a result, if you start a plan on a Saturday, you won’t complete week 1 before week 2 starts, the remaining sessions from the 1st week will be lost. A little frustrating as not everyone works a Monday to Friday job. It contains about 6 hours of cycling per week with an equal amount of staring at the data in the Companion App and Strava data afterwards too. Somewhat of a commitment when you have a full-time job and other important things like dogs to walk and Netflix to watch, but it’s less than I was doing on an average week.

The ‘foundation’ workouts pop up a lot and I hate them, not because the intensity is high, but that continual fast cadence. It’s like trying to sprint down a really steep hill, your legs spinning wildly to keep upright. I’ve traditionally been a slow peddler so a 90-100 cadence is unnatural and tiring in itself, but I especially loath having to maintain this during the rest periods. I’m sure all it’s doing is destroying my knee and ankle cartilage. Zwift doesn’t penalise you for incorrect cadence, but it must be there for a reason so I always keep it up the whole way through. It must work though as I find I gravitate naturally towards the 90 mark now and longer rides seem easier.

Strength sessions catch me out and Zwift really needs to make a small alteration to them. The sessions either want you to sprint in a big gear for each effort or for you to pedal slowly instead, doing a kind of single-leg squat effort. The problem is, the message that tells you to go fast or slow doesn’t appear until after the effort starts, when I’m usually grimacing too much to see anything. Zwift needs to make these messages appear prior to the efforts starting so you know what to expect in advance.

I remembered well enough from my previous use of this plan that the first 3 weeks are quite relaxed, so I also took the opportunity to complete the Unemployed badge for 14 consecutive days cycled. Starting with the FTP Ramp test, I just skipped all my rest days for the first 2 weeks, adding in short rides. It was really easy until the cumulative effects of not resting took its toll on the 13th and 14th days. I could barely feel my legs, the only indication they were moving being the onscreen cadence. This was a great eye opener into the exact importance of ensuring you have recovery rides and rest days in your schedule.

I also love a trophy, and digital trophies on Strava are even better as they don’t need dusting. So at the end of the 3rd week I also decided to conclude my nearly 90-minute long workout by completing the May Gran Frodo award. Disappointingly this has nothing to do with the Baggins family tree, I just needed to turn the 30km from the workout into a 100km loop.

Riding My Luck

Towards the end of week 4 I had decided to join some colleagues for a Meetup ride. The first guy I spoke to was super keen and rides a lot. He’s a little older than myself, describes himself as similarly sized to myself, and although his FTP is higher I felt we could ride together reasonably well. He told me there would be a female colleague joining us. I said great, the more the merrier. Then he told me she’s much younger than us and a triathlete. This did not bode well. Thankfully he promised me a no-drop ride as he can’t keep up with her either.

I then happily agreed to join, until I saw he had picked the Tour of Fire and Ice route ending at the top of the Alpe. Last time I rode up the Alpe on the shorter Road to the Sky route it took me over 3 hours, and this was supposed to be my active rest day too. I joined them anyway and programmed in my rest day workout, but realised after we started I had incorrectly selected the much harder Foundation program button.

I set off at my prescribed 115 watts to warm up, I was locked to this and didn’t want to do more this day anyway. I was pushing a measly 1.12 w/kg, the speedy triathlete was pushing 4.5 w/kg as she flew off into the distance. We flew through the first section, with me mostly dangling at the end of a long piece of elastic at the back of the pack. Occasionally the elastic would catapult me past my 2 colleagues at lightening pace before they cruised past me again. I wondered if Strava would be giving me new sector PB’s I would never be able to beat, but that doesn’t seem to be the case upon later inspection. As we neared the base of the Alpe I had a minor emergency in the house which meant I had to jump off the bike. By the time I clambered back on, nearly tipping the whole bike over due to my haste, the elastic to my colleagues had snapped completely and I was left to trudge up the bottom part of the Alpe alone with no company.

This was not the only disaster in the first 4 weeks. I had a few rides where I forgot water bottles or towels, and once or twice I had a weird technical glitch with my fan where I inexplicably failed to make any contact with the ‘on’ button, or even plug it into the wall. Thankfully, my biggest fan is my wife and she is very good at resolving tech issues and water shortages so I don’t need to get off the bike mid-session.

There was some fortune in my first 3 weeks too. Several of my workouts ended almost exactly at the finish banner of my intended route, planned for efficiency of course. The Zwift gods were kind this day!

Perhaps more importantly, my weight has dropped from 109kg to 104kg. Just 2kg from my recent best and nearly half way to my 10% target. Without factoring in any FTP gains, this brings my w/kg up to 2.08. I’ll talk more about weight loss in my next post, along with the remainder of my 6 week plan and results of my next FTP test.

Questions or Comments?

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Let me say this up front: I don’t like time trials. The lone suffering, the mental gymnastics required to keep pushing constantly, the lack of strategic elements… all unattractive to me.

Which explains why I can count on one hand the number of Zwift time trials I’ve raced. And this includes team TTs, which I’ll admit are a bit more fun. But still not my cup of tea.

Yet here I was, setting up my virtual TT rig on a Saturday morning to take part in the weekly WTRL iTT. Why? Because every once in a while I get a hankering to do something different, something outside of my usual. Plus, after thinking through my post about Crit City Redefining ZwiftPower Categories, I had been wondering what sort of wattage I could hold in an all-out TT effort, where I wasn’t modulating wattage to sit in the draft.

By my calculations the race would last around 40 minutes. Not a bad length of time for a proxy FTP test. Let’s race!

TT Basics

Clearly, I’m not an experienced TT racer. I’ve already covered my lack of Zwift TT experience, and the only outdoor TT’s I’ve ridden have been few and always Merckx-style. I’m no TT specialist. That said, there are a few things I knew for sure going into this race:

1. Don’t blow up early: the tendency is to start hard, which can burn you out for the rest of the race. Get up to speed quickly, but don’t fatigue yourself early.
2. Equipment matters: when every second counts, you want the fastest possible setup. This is especially true with TT races, and more so on Zwift, where you don’t have to worry about whether your virtual cockpit fits or how your deep-dish wheels interact with crosswinds.
3. Over-pace uphill, recover downhill: pushing hardest when you’re moving slowest (uphill) results in the fastest overall times. So push 5-10% over pace on uphills, and drop the power a bit once you’ve hit cruising speed on descents.
4. Pacing is everything: this is the biggest thing to understand. Know the race route and your own power numbers, you should know what sort of pace you can hold. Stick to that pace, avoiding the temptation to go harder early or ease up when you’re suffering.

The Warmup

I began the morning with my typical race prep protocol: two pieces of caffeine gum and some PR lotion on the legs. Then it was over to Tick Tock, where I started by equipping myself with one of the fastest TT setups in Zwift: the Felt IA frame and Zipp 858/Super-9 wheels. This was a flat course, so bike choice was easy: simply use the most aero frame and wheels available.

I added an aero helmet to complete the look, then headed out for a ~20-minute warmup where I made sure my heart rate got up to 160 a few times. Always a good idea to make sure the engine is firing on all cylinders.

Variability

We were riding one lap of Watopia’s Waistband, a 25.5 km (15.8 mile) route with only 95 m (312′) of elevation. This was good news: I like flat routes for TT’s, as I can keep my effort quite steady. I do best with low-VI efforts.

(What is VI, you ask? Variability Index, according to this TrainingPeaks article, is “a way to measure how smooth or ‘variable’ your power output was during the ride. It is calculated by dividing your Normalized Power by your Average Power. A steady and even output, like during a triathlon, should have a VI of 1.05 or less. During a criterium race your VI may be as high as 1.2 or more.”)

VI for indoor riding is generally lower than outdoor, given the steady-pedaling nature of Zwift rides. This is why you’ll hear cyclists say “Zwift racing is a lot like a TT effort.” Because power is more steady in Zwift races, even road races with drafting enabled, due to how Zwift’s pack dynamics and physics work. Additionally, a lower Trainer Difficulty setting (I run mine around 30%) will logically result in a lower VI, since you have less resistance fluctuation affecting your pedal pressure.

The Start

A TT race doesn’t start like a typical Zwift road race, since you don’t have the stronger riders attacking in order to establish that initial selection. Instead, a TT race start is all about getting yourself up to speed quickly, then settling into your rhythm.

Our group immediately strung out, and I found myself in 2nd place, behind James Bailey. Right away I was second-guessing my effort level. Was I going too hard? I was holding 320-330 watts, and felt alright, but I also knew that this would be right on the limit of what I could do for 40 minutes on a good day. And I wasn’t convinced this was going to be a good day.

I averaged 320 watts over the first 10 minutes, covering 7.1 km. This would be my highest power average of the race, which means I did go a bit too hard, too early. Rookie mistake.

The Middle

I tried to hold my power steady in the 320 watt range, but I could tell I was flagging. I also did my best to up my effort on any inclines, following the TT mantra of go hardest when you’re going the slowest. But I was still losing ground, sinking to 7th place in our group of 40 by the halfway point.

I averaged 304 watts for the second 10 minute block, covering 7.1 km.

The third quarter of the ride was my worst. I was struggling to find the best cadence, swapping uncomfortably between spinning and mashing. I did find that working in a lower cadence in a tougher gear seemed to let me hold power a bit better, so that’s what I settled on. (Except when that got too hard, and I shifted to an easier gear. It wasn’t pretty.)

This was so different from the drafting-enabled road races I typically do in Zwift. Those races are all about making the front selection, attacking where it’s smart, and conserving energy for the final push. Here, though, I had to constantly remind myself to keep pushing, to go all in. Maintaining top speed was the priority, and that meant riding right at threshold almost constantly, regardless of what other riders were doing.

I was also riding in camera view 3 (first person view), which I like to do. I usually don’t use this view for normal road races, since I can’t see riders around me as well. But for a TT, why not? Let’s immerse ourselves in the painful experience!

I kept a constant eye on the rider list, looking to see who was gaining on me and if I was gaining ground on those ahead. The results weren’t promising. I was losing ground to S Pruett and M Costello, and not gaining anything on my teammate K Rohrlach up the road.

I averaged 301 watts for the third 10 minute block, covering just 6.5 km. 320, 304, 301… things were trending in the wrong direction.

The Finish

As I left the volcano circuit with approximately 10 minutes to go, I steeled myself for a final hard effort.

Only 10 more minutes, Eric. You can push harder for 10 minutes.

I’d been passed by a hard-charging A Kraemer as we left the volcano, putting me in 9th place. But I had been paying attention to the riders up the road, and was pretty convinced that three of the eight ahead were going to be disqualified in the final results. (The first place rider was on zPower, and two other riders had been holding ~4.5 w/kg pretty steady.) If I was correct, that meant my current finish position was actually 6th, not 9th.

Two riders were just seconds up the road: S Pruett and K Rohrlach. If I could finish ahead of them, that would put me in 4th. It wouldn’t be a podium, but it would be close. And that was just the motivation I needed as we turned off of Ocean Boulevard toward the bridge toward Fuego Flats.

5 minutes left. You can do anything for 5 minutes!

I stood up, hammering my way across the dirt section and up the bridge, knowing Crr differences on these surfaces would make me roll even slower, so extra power would help me put time into the competition.

Pruett was 3 seconds ahead, Rohrlach 6 seconds…

I kept the power up, holding somewhere around 330-360 watts. By the time we passed the desert start pens, Pruett and Rohrlach were just wheel lengths ahead.

Pruett was pouring on the watts, but Rohrlach appeared to be flagging. I passed them both before we exited the loop section just before the sprint start line.

Less than 1 minute! Empty the tank!

I shifted and stood up, knowing the final sprint was only a ~35 second effort. Pruett put in a good dig, but I was able to stay ahead, finishing 7th. And just as I had predicted, that meant 4th place on ZwiftPower. James Bailey, the rider who began in the lead, would finish 1st. Well done, James!

And well done Rohrlach and Pruett – thanks for pushing me! (As it turns out, they are both DIRT teammates. Pruett just wasn’t wearing team kit.) We finished 4-5-6 on ZwiftPower – not a bad result for the DIRT squad.

I averaged 310 watts for the fourth and final 10 minutes, covering 7 km.

See my activity on Strava >
See my activity on Zwift >
See race results on ZwiftPower >

Takeaways

This was definitely closer to an FTP test than a typical Zwift road race. Here’s a power zones comparison between a recent Crit City road race and this TT. (Both races were right around 41 minutes long.)

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Notice how I spent much of my time in the lower-effort Tempo zone for the Crit City race? This is where I typically sit when I’m just hanging in the pack, conserving energy in the draft. In a flat TT, of course, the goal is to ride at your limit for the entire race. And I think I was pretty close to that! (My legs were sore for two days afterward.) Even though I’m not generally a big fan of the TT race, you can’t argue that it’s an incredibly challenging workout.

It would be really interesting to crunch the numbers and graph some sort of probability curve for race results based on a rider’s wattage and whether it’s a TT or standard road race. Because wattage certainly seems to correlate more closely to results in a TT compared to a road race, where strategy plays a more significant role. (See the results of this TT vs the Crit City race above as an example.) This makes the TT less interesting, in my mind. But I can see how it would appeal to a purist as well.

Lastly, I was left questioning whether I could have pushed harder, especially doing the 2nd and 3rd 10-minute blocks of this race. It was so challenging to stay focused and keep the power high during these sections, but I had good power at the very end of the race. Did that mean I had more to give in the middle?

There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to take on this awful challenge again sometime down the road. It probably won’t happen any time soon. But it will most certainly happen.

Your Comments

Are you a fan of the iTT? Got any tips for me? Share below!