Back to Ironman training and Brecca.

So having had two failed attempts at breaking 20 minutes for 5k it's time to start training a bit longer with Brecca on September 9th and Ironman Barcelona at the end of the month I haven't done a huge amount of long distance stuff. I was loosely following the Trainerroad plan on my turbo trainer. So it's broken down into 8 week blocks and it generally involves doing an FTP test at the start of each block. So with 8 weeks left to go I had to do my FTP test today. Was delighted with the results, I managed to move it from 232 to 273 (which I think is the highest i've ever recorded. So for someone who doesn't know FTP is functional Threshold power. So it's how many watts you can hold steady for exactly 1 hour. The test is actually only 20 minutes you do a couple of warm ups then empty the tank for 5 minutes then 10 minutes recovery and then 20 minutes as hard as you can........you feel weak by the time your done. I was hoping I'd get an improvement but wasn't expecting that much to be honest. I mean don't get me wrong I'm still crap compared to normal athletes, but I'm registering on the scale which is a start sometimes I come up as untrained now at least on the chart i'm coming up as Cat 3. You FTP doesn't have that much of a bearing on how fast you can go it depends on your weight, the actual power i'm putting down isn't too bad but it's the fact that the pros are pushing more power and weight a 1/4 of me. So you get your FTP and divide it by your weight in kilos so for me 273 divided by 90 and you get 3.03 that puts me into CAT 4. and if I manage to get down to 83 kilos which is the plan that gets me to 3.29

Looking forward to really getting stuck into this 8 week block of training.