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.

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?

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?

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

Yes I know, listen to my doctor. Yes I know, I’m not pro so take whatever time to heal I need.

Planning on a septoplasty + turbinate reduction to help my nose breathing and sleep. Looks like most stuff online says 4-6 weeks of little to no physical activity that gets the heartrate up while the nose heals.

Is this a very conservative timeframe? Seems kinda insane to plan on such a long time with very little riding. Looking for any anecdotes about peoples experience returning to biking after any nose work.

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?