First FF, screwed up 5 min, interpretation of results

Training
1

Hey all,
I’m brand new to SUF, and fairly new (without the brand) to cycling in general.
I did my very first FF just yesterday, after I gave myself a good week to get used to the trainer, the SW and indoor riding. As for the results, I have two questions:

  1. I screwed up the 5 min effort. Plain and simple. I wasn’t sandbagging really, but when you come into this test with close to zero experience, it’s really hard to pace yourself correctly. Frankly, also the advice that’s given in the “How to get the most out of FF” only helps so much. It refers to how I should feel 2.5 min into the test. Which I will only know 2.5 min into the test :wink: Let’s face it, I underperformed, whichever the reasons. Another point is, I did not feel properly warmed up. Perhaps that is because the artificial power metrics the App assigned to me during on boarding were way too low, or I simply need more time (I’m an old man after all).
    All this resulted in me being 2 minutes into the 20 min effort, riding marginally below my 5 min result and thinking, boy, I think I could do etter if I simply did the 5 min again right now…
    The following efforts were much easier to pace for me. 20 min gave me the time to settle in and adjust after a few minutes, with enough time left of the clock. I’m an experienced 5k and 10k runner, so 20 min all out efforts feel like my living room. I think I got veeery close to my max. I nailed the 1 min too, I’m pretty sure.
    The app of course gave me a warning flag, telling me I had not even achieved 115% of my FTP during the 5 min.
    So how should I deal with this? I don’t feel experienced enough to manually play with the numbers. But I also don’t want to build my entire training around a MAP weakness that isn’t real. I haven’t planned to redo FF within a week or so. I mean, I could, but… seriously? What I could do is repeating the warm up and the 5 min, but I’m not sure how good an idea that is. A better 5 min effort might have had an impact on the rest of the test as well, simply raising my MAP result might also leave me with artificially high FTP and AC numbers.
    I’m a bit clueless here. Any good advice?

  2. Being an experienced runner, my LTHR of 168 seems very low. When I run, my threshold is in the high 170s. Just recently did another Conconi. I finished my most recent marathon 2017 with 176 bpm average. Yes, I know, that sounds like I was 16. Trust me, I’m not…
    That said, I do understand that LTHR in running and cycling are not necessarily the same. For me, when on a bike, my effort feels a lot more “localised” in my legs compared to when I’m running. So I can imagine that these specific muscles already produce a lot of lactate while the rest of my body is still asleep.
    Frankly, as a bike noob, I find myself quite frequently with legs burning, definitely going anaerobic, while my HR sits somewhere around resting values. This feeling usually sets in when I get closer to my bike than 10 meters :wink:
    I definitely got better (i.e. legs felt better, HR got more responsive and came up to higher numbers) when I had done some 1000 km during the summer. Now after 3 months off the bike I’m back to square one.
    Any comments on this? Is this normal behaviour for people who are new to cycling but have quite some endurance background?
    Should I go with the 168 LTHR and trust the app here?

A lot of text, sorry for that. And thanks for reading to everyone who made it to here!
René

1 Like
2

Welcome to SUF. Full Frontal is a tough test. My 1st test wasn’t great and in my most recent (3rd test) I had a similar situation on the 5 minute MAP.

After my 1st test I just went ahead and started the pre-season MTB plan to get a feel for the training and would make adjustments to my metrics in the individual workouts using the sliders in the app when I felt good during a ride. At the 6 week mark I rested using the Full Monty and saw improvement and then tested again with the Full Frontal at the end of the plan and improved further.

For my 3rd test I changed strategies. I already knew my MAP was higher that how I tested so I used my previous value in my 4DP metrics. I validated that this was the right choice by performing the scheduled workouts. I think my issue with the 5 minute test was that I just went out too hot.

You might want to try starting the plan and you can always perform a Half Monty test a few weeks into the plan if you feel you need to bump the numbers. Best of luck!

1 Like
3

Quick update:
I did Joyride yesterday. I know it’s perhaps not the hardest workout out there, but it’s MAP oriented and I needed to bridge a few days until the start of my plan.
I did it with the MAP targets the app assigned to me, which are already higher than my actual output over the 5 min part of FF (as I said in my original post, I didn’t even achieve 115% of FTP, hence the app raised it to exactly those 115%).

Now, Joyride was actually that. A joyride. I mean, I did suffer. But, it was rather a relaxed version of suffering. One where you say, yes, my legs are burning, and yes, I must breathe every now and then, but at the end of the first long effort I was absolutely sure I got this. Despite the fact that 4 more would follow.
To provide more hard facts, my max HR was exactly my LTHR, never above.

So, for those who have experience with Joyride: Should it be this way? Or can I see this as another indication that my MAP is set too low, simply because I screwed up the 5 min test?

My idea now is to do the Half Monty (it’s the first bike workout of the ‘transition up’ plan anyway, and I intend to start it Friday).
I would see what the delta is in FTP between the FF and the HM. Then take the MAP result from HM, subtract exactly this delta, and go with that as my new MAP setting.

This approach would rely on two assumptions:

  1. The FTP result from FF is reasonably close to reality. Hence if the HM FTP result deviates from that, HM is wrong, and the delta will tell me by how much it is wrong.
  2. HM is similarly wrong for MAP and for FTP. So when I apply the FTP delta to the HM MAP result, I should again get reasonably close to reality.

Can any of the coaches confirm this is a good idea? After all, I’m going to base quite a few weeks worth of training on this logic.

Great thanks!
René

4

I found Joyride relatively easy with solid 4DP metrics. Max HR was slightly below my LTHR. I just failed AVDP with the same metrics, so that is a much harder test of your MAP. Max HR there was bouncing off my limiter!