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Functional Power Threshold – Part 1

05.03.2012 by Ray Niekamp // Leave a Comment

Guest poster Don Blount tackles some heavy-duty training. In the first of two posts, he explains what it’s all about.

It was an offer that was hard to refuse. It was a test to determine my functional threshold power.

It would only take 10 minutes and it was free.

In short, functional threshold power, known as FTP, is a benchmark of the body’s overall efficiency. It is the effort a rider can sustain for about an hour before too much lactate accumulates in their system and their body begins to break down.

There are a number of ways to test it but Graeme Street, owner of Cyclo-Core and “Recognized Cycling Expert,” according to his video, was offering an opportunity to coach me through a 10-minute indoor test to determine my FTP.

You need a few things to do the test with the video: 1) bike trainer or rollers 2) power meter or heart rate monitor 3) speed/cadence sensor.

I used rollers and a Garmin Edge 305 bike computer with heart rate monitor and speed/cadence sensor.

I was ready. But the problem was that no matter what I did I could not get the video to play completely on any of the three computers in my home. Not a one. The video would begin and play for a bit, but after about 15 minutes, it would stop. I even emailed Street for advice but it still would not work. So I viewed the video on a computer away from my home network. I watched it several times and I took copious notes.

And then I tried it again.

I set up my laptop and rollers in my garage, let the video buffer and launched it again. This time it played, for a short time. The video went as far as the warm up before it froze again.

But by this time I was familiar enough with video’s content to finish on my own. It would have been more effective with Street helping me through it as I had too much left in the tank at the end. This was not a max test but still, I did not ride hard enough.

That test showed a FTP heart rate of 156 beats per minute. I used that in my workouts and it just seemed too easy. So a few days later I did it again and calculated an FTP heart rate of 162 beats per minute. I now use that figure for my riding.

If you are interested in testing yourself and have not done so before, let me warn you this test hurts! It hurts physically and it hurts mentally.

Click here if you would like to see this Graeme Street video. The site says you can take the test anytime within the next five days but the link has been up for about two months. The test itself is free but it also serves as a promo to Street’s training systems.

Regardless of whether you use this video or decide to do it on your own, an FTP test is well worth doing. I’ll elaborate in a future post on how it impacted my riding.

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Categories // training Tags // FTP

Time to Start Training

01.17.2012 by Ray Niekamp // Leave a Comment

Monday was my last day off before the start of spring semester (Yeah, I know — we academics have it rough), so I was determined to get in a ride. Pat called one of our good local riding friends, because she had the MLK holiday off too, and we met at the Veloway for some laps.

Our friend Penny is coming back from a hip replacement, and is almost ready to rejoin our B-level club rides. But she has something more pressing on her mind right now. In March, she and her husband Rick will spend several days riding in the Big Bend area of West Texas.

The Big Bend is mountainous, so the routes they’ll be riding will be challenging, to say the least. Not only is Penny riding to come back from the surgery, but now she’s riding to train for her biking trip. And that lit the lightbulb over my head.

The Bike Noob riding a century several years ago. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s mid-January already! While I don’t have any multi-day mountain rides coming up, I do have some rides I want to do in March. And March is a whopping six weeks away. The easy riding I’ve been doing has been good at maintaining my base. Now I have to start doing something to boost both my speed and my endurance.

What am I going to do? I’m not really sure yet. That’s not really a problem, since I have gobs of training plans around here — both in cycling books and various online sites. I’ll come up with something that will work.

But I know I’ll be working on two different elements: increasing distance and riding faster. On weekends, at least one of my rides will be longer than I’ve been used to. I’ll be increasing that long distance each week, until I’m up to metric century snuff. During the week, I’ll get in a fast ride. My fast rides might involve intervals, almost certainly fartlek, or maybe just maintaining a higher average speed than I’m normally comfortable with.

But I’ll be riding with a purpose from here on out.

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Categories // training Tags // training

Putting It All In Perspective

01.12.2012 by Ray Niekamp // 1 Comment

Guest poster Don Blount looks at different kinds of pain.

Suffering sometimes is all about perspective.

I recently had two old dental fillings replaced without use of anesthesia. More than a few people cringe when I tell them that story.

I did not ask for this experience. Before the dentist started the work, he tested the area with a blast of cold air and then of cold water. “You didn’t flinch,” he said. “So I’m going to try this without giving you anything. Why numb you up and have you put up with needles if you don’t have to, right?”

WHHHHAAAT????? I thought.

Maybe I didn’t flinch because I have a high pain tolerance. Maybe I didn’t flinch because I was too tense to move.

However, he assured me that he would give me anesthetic if I was in pain.

As my dentist poked, prodded, drilled, polished and went about his work, my mind drifted to cycling. Specifically it drifted to suffering on the bike.

Middle Bar.

I remembered some of the climbs I did in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains last year. I was taken on a club ride up road called Stoney Creek. I don’t remember seeing any stones or a creek, I remember a never-ending climb, pedaling squares and gasping for air.

There was another ride on Paloma Road that I I kept telling myself to just keep turning the pedals, keep turning the pedals, k-e-e-p t-u-r-n-i-n-g….. You get the idea.

And there was Middle Bar. I remembered riding (and walking) alone up a bumpy sorry-@#*! road. I never told anyone this but at one point I was going so slowly that I just toppled over and fell like a top that had lost its spin.

I was unhurt, my bike was fine but I managed to damage the new Deda handlebar tape I had put on just a few days earlier.

But all in all, this riding, this suffering, somehow made me a stronger, better rider.

And as I sat there in the dentist’s chair mouth agape, drill whining, I did not think of the fun, easy or enjoyable rides but those difficult rides. And I knew that if I could survive those bike rides then I could survive the dental work because I suffered more on those rides.

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Categories // guest post, training Tags // Blount, climbing, guest post, pain

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