For today’s climbing ride I took on Tacx Software’s Cormet de Roselend Stage 1 – Col du Pré. This was labelled as difficult, though I felt it might be easier than Col des Glieres as whilst this was a longer overall climb, the ride was 95% uphill, so in theory, the average gradient should be less steep.
Well, that was the theory.
As with other Tacx Video rides, the climbs in particular, this ride was visually beautiful. Climbing through a lovely French mountain village, and then onwards into the scenic mountain roads.
Here’s the blurb as per Tacx:
The Cormet du Roeslend has two ways up from the Alpine town of Beaufort. The most used way in past versions of the Tour de France is the main road which is mostly wooded & perhaps a little dull until the reservoir. In 2018 The Tour de France will take the much more scenic way via the narrow Col du Pré. This climb starts with a warm up on the main road to Areches where you have some easy grades to prepare your self for the main part of the climb that starts the other side of the village. From here to the top its a fairly hard sustained climb with little rest to be found until the broad summit at 1748m. The ride will then descend down to the Roselend reservoir where Stage 2 will take you further to the top of the Cormet du Roselend its self at 1968m
Training Tip – The climbing starts direct so either take the 1st rather steady climb to Areches easy to warm up or do so before starting. The main climb is about the perfect distance for Hard Tempo & LT for the faster climbers
Tacx Software description for Cormet de Roselend Stage 1 – Col du Pré
I opted for about 10 opponents for this ride, roughly 5 above my FTP, and 5 around or below.
Therefore I expected to be solidly “mid-pack” during this ride. However, unlike Zwift or others, you gain no drafting benefit from riders around you. They are merely icons on the minimap.
Still, I do like this feature – it’s a good way to keep myself on track.
OK, so before jumping into this one, there is one thing to cover:
I messed up.
I knew, from previous rides, that sometimes I have had issues recovering the videos during these rides. The early sections seem fine, but after about 30 minutes the recording turns into a stutter-fest.
It turns out that this is because my computer struggles with encoding the video somehow when rendering a 720p film.
In other words, recording the rides works fine if I stream the rides. However it presents this problem if I pre-download the videos ahead of time, and then record the ride that uses this downloaded film.
Lesson learned: in future, use streaming mode. It’s less nice visually for me, but at least it means the recording works properly.
tl;dr: I lost the last 1/2 of this ride to freeze frame video. As such I only have a few screenies from the end of the ride.
Straight up I went wrong on this ride.
In short: serious ride mismanagement.
The longer story is this:
I decided that as yesterday was a recovery ride, and the day before a rest day, I was in a good place to do an on road FTP test.
I’ve tried this approach on previous climbing rides, but not seen it through for the full 20 minutes. This is typically because my usual Saturday ride is too intensive. At least, that’s my excuse.
But not today.
Today I did a 10km warm up on Zwift’s Innsbruck route which took me over the 100km weekly riding goal. This was not a strenuous experience by any means. Just enough to get my legs working and ready to jump into an immediate hour or so up hill.
With warmed up legs, and feeling decent about life, I jumped into this one and went for it.
My aim was to hit 220w average for the first 20 minutes.
The first 10 minutes went fine.
The next 5 minutes were a struggle.
And the last 5 minutes were an eternity.
In other words, just as I remember the only other FTP Test I have ever done.
During this first portion of the climb, I quickly realised – by looking at the colours on the route profile at the bottom of the screen – that the first up hill block was a lot less intense than the next two thirds / remaining 8km or so.
There wasn’t a lot I could do about this. I perhaps could have better recon’d the ride, but at this point I’d committed to work and was about 15 minutes in.
What I hoped was that I’d hit the little green flat section at or around 20 minutes in, and then use this block as a recovery portion before having to get into the next, harder part of the ride.
As it happened, I was at about 19:30 when I hit the green section, and so had to down shift and still power on through the flat as I needed to get a solid 20 minute effort in.
And I managed to do this. I struggled to keep up the watts when dropping on to the flat, but came out with an average wattage of 218w for the first ~20 minutes.
Of course, this was a rough measurement as I didn’t have immediate access to the stats. I needed to wait for the left HUD menu thing to auto-scroll on to the overall ride totals.
Whilst not as true a measurement as a fully timed Zwift-style FTP test, I’m happy enough to put down the 218w figure, and this roughly corresponds to Strava as below.
Taking the 95% of 218w puts me at an FTP of 207w. Even if I drop this conservatively down to 216w, this puts me at 205w.
Either of those figures is something I would be more than happy with at this point.
I do feel that better reflects my current ability than the 195w I currently am at since my last test.
As soon as I hit the 20 minute mark (it was just a bit after, maybe 20:15 to 20:25 before the HUD rotated round to show my overall ride time) I took the measurements (mentally) and considerably eased off the gas.
More on that later.
For now, I couldn’t find a Strava segment for the first part of the climb, so I made my own. Well, technically I made two. Neither was exactly at the 20 minute mark, but was about the best I could do.
This gives me considerable confidence going into the real FTP test which I am still planning to do during the Christmas break.
I now know I am capable of maintaining somewhere between 215 and 218w for the full twenty minutes, and I certainly came out of this in a lot better shape than at the end of my previous full FTP test.
But here’s where things got really interesting.
As mentioned above, my plan had been to smash it for 20 minutes.
I’d done that.
And in doing so, I’d burned an absolute ton of my capacity. Even though I felt like I’d emptied the tank, I then had killed most of the flat part which I’d expected to use as recovery, and worse, still had the remaining 2/3rds of the ride left.
And that was the much harder part of the climb.
Jumping into the next segment of the climb was really challenging.
At this point it became all too clear how foolish my ride management / strategy had been. I could barely hold 170w for a significant portion of the harder climb.
This all comes back to the main thing I’ve learned about cycling:
Tackling these harder rides / races is largely tortoise and hare.
All too often I see it on Zwift. You start a race. A sizeable portion of the group hits it full gas out of the gate. Then slowly but surely, I start to catch, overtake, and then drop many riders who went too hard, too soon.
I was one of those riders today.
I don’t regret doing the on-road FTP test approach, but it was a stupid move considering the intensity and length of the remaining climb.
The remaining ~7km was one of the hardest climbs I have had to tackle. Not due to actual intensity, but because of where I was at physically.
To be honest, looking back, I am actually surprised I was able to maintain 170w or so, let alone several out of the saddle efforts pushing myself up to 230w or so.
Thinking about it, it makes me wonder how much I must have left in the tank on the first 20 minutes … maybe in the Zwift test I can aim for 225w. Then again, maybe that’s being extremely cocky, which doesn’t usually end well for me.
It was fairly torturous to watch as my average wattage over the course of the ride slowly but inexorably ticked down, watt by hard won watt.
By the hour mark, I’d slipped to 199w as best I recall.
And this brings me to the validity of the 20 minute FTP figure.
The FTP figure is, as best I am aware, a representation of the average wattage I should be able to hold for an hour.
When I first hit 195w as my FTP, there was no way in hell that I could maintain 195w for an hour. I’d almost killed myself holding ~205w for 20 minutes.
It took me many months after this to ride a full hour at 195w average. Unfortunately I cannot find the ride where this happened for the first time. My search-foo is weak.
All this said, hitting the hour mark with my average wattage having slipped to 198w or so, surely this implies that my true FTP is 198w, and not the ~205w as guesstimated from those first 20 minutes?
Still, that’s not how the test works, I guess.
My gut – and some proof from this ride – tells me I’d come out of a Zwift FTP test at or around 205w now. That’s pretty much bang on what I guessed for a few weeks now. And isn’t it weird how that’s pretty much what I got today? #nocoincidences
But I also truly believe that, like last time, I’d get a new figure but not be able to hit that figure for the hour for many months after. I guess that’s what continued training at a new, higher intensity would inevitably pull me up too.
And then the process would start all over again.
The graphs are not pleasant viewing today. Which is great stuff as I have several representations of the same data for you 🙂
As ever on a climb, I struggled to get anything above 70rpm for large chunks of the ride. I’m actually a bit surprised to see a 72rpm average today.
I’m really pleased to have come out of the first 20 minutes without breaking above 188bpm on the heart rate. This is a significant improvement which has come thanks to many, many months now of genuine hard work.
It still seems utterly baffling to me that these climbs are as hard as they are, but Alpe Du Zwift continues to be the highest calorie burning ride I have ever done.
I think I could do better should I ever tackle this ride again. Better ride management, keeping a more realistic average wattage as a target, and working on cadence should surely mean a better performance next time around.
I’ve learned a bunch of things about myself today.
I’m feeling more confident about my next true FTP test, that’s for sure.
As I’ve mentioned several times already in previous ride reports, my aim is to finish the year above 200w, and I feel like I’m a long way towards beating this goal at this point.
I’ve also learned a few things about the technical aspects of recording these rides which should mean I can better record the later parts of these climbs – often the most interesting parts of the whole thing, and certainly some of the nicest, visually.
Until Tuesday, I’m off for a rest.
