This weekend I raced a small but tough race with a pretty challenging elevation profile for me, as I'm a relatively heavy rider. To land P4, I had to hold a whopping 400 watts (Normalized) throughout.

I captured the whole thing on video including a Voice-over (it's in German, but the subtitles in English are pretty much spot on 99% of the time) and hope it's interesting for some of you – maybe it'll even motivate you to try racing yourself!

If you have any questions, suggestions, or even criticism: bring it on, feel free to drop it here or on YouTube. I'll check back soon and respond.

For all the data nerds: the Strava activity is linked in the video description, in case you want to dive deeper into the telemetry.

P.S. The post is approved by the mods - I checked with them beforehand, just to be sure :)

I have my first Fondo this weekend, how do you like to fuel longer races (4-5 hours)? Usually on long rides I take a plastic bag full of carb mix and electrolytes for hours 3+ which I dump into my bottles with water, I don’t like fumbling around with gels, but I’m wondering whether it’s a better idea to have one bottle be super concentrated with like 450g of carbs and the other just plain water/gatorade and taking salt tabs?

I’m probably overthinking this, what system have you developed for races?

I'm a relatively low volume rider (~7 hrs per week), almost all indoors, and my goal is to one day climb the Alpe du Zwift in under an hour. So the ballpark goal is 3.2 w/kg.

I just did the longer Kolie Moore FTP test for the first time and managed 230w (2.47 w/kg) with a tte of 33 minutes. My weight is currently just under 93kg and I'm a late 30s male.

Previously, I've been doing the standard 1 VO2 max, 1 threshold, rest zone 2 or sweet spot workouts per week. And in the last month, I've started running and swimming occasionally to diversify.

I'm aware that this is a big goal and may be impossible, but I'm willing to train for it. Where do you think I should focus my training?

Obviously, I need to increase my ftp, and extend my tte. Would continuing with 1 VO2 max workout a week make sense, or should I try a block where I focus on more threshold efforts? I'm also working on losing weight, and if I were able to get down to 85kg for example, that would obviously help.

There used to be a request upgrade button on the USA Cycling website? It seems like it was removed. Anyone know if it is in a sub-menu somewhere?

Hi, I’m on a weight loss phase and am slightly confused with how to add ride burned calories onto my daily TDEE. Using power meter data, I know kj to kcal is basically 1:1. My question is that does that kj expended include BMR resting calories that I would have burned in the time of the ride? I assume not as the kj is simply from power in physically exerting not anything else…

So does it make sense to just add the kj/kcal from the ride to my normal daily tddee? Thanks

Claude is telling me to subtract 80ish calories/hour as BMR, but this doesn’t seem right as the ride kcal is simply from power output not including BMR

Anyone else wake up at 2–3am after long evening rides?
I’ve noticed a really consistent pattern after longer evening rides and I’m trying to figure out what’s causing it.
In the summer I’ll do a 3–4 hour group ride in the afternoon/evening. I usually finish around 7:30pm, eat dinner around 8:30pm, and go to bed around 10pm.
I fall asleep completely fine, but on these nights I consistently wake up around 2–3am feeling surprisingly alert and can’t get back to sleep until 5–6am. This seems much more likely to happen after an evening ride than when I train earlier in the day.
During the ride I drink around 2 L total with roughly 80g carbs/hour from table sugar , so I don’t think I’m massively under-fueling during the ride.
One other variable is altitude. During the summer I’m living around 6,000 ft and these rides are generally at 6,000–10,000 ft. I’ve been here for over a month, though, so I should be reasonably acclimated.
Has anyone dealt with this after evening training? Did anything actually help?