Tour of Sufferlandria

[MrPie]

Looks like us two are the only fruit cakes mad enough to own up to doing this tour. What % FTP are you planning to his Saturday with?

24C in the garage yesterday, 21C today.

Jealous of your rest day........

 

[Bollo]

I'm surprised there weren't more participants from CC, but it's been cosy. Good luck for the weekend.

For the FTP, I'm going to stick at 100% as the kickr tends to increase the resistance over 3 or 4 seconds in ERG mode, so the 5 second intervals will just be ramps and the 10-15 second intervals will lose a good chunk of their sting. I've seen it suggested on the ToS facebook page that it's better to switch the kickr to resistance mode for stage 8 and scale your effort just as for a 'dumb' turbo. I'd probably drop the profiles to 90% if I were doing this and see how long my legs held out.

Judging by your posting times and garage temperature you're either a rich insomniac who has a heated garage to keep his Ferraris nice, or you ain't from around these parts. I'd happily trade my rest day for 21C; it was -2C in my pain shed last night.

 

[Bollo]

Wow - just checked the trainer road participant count. With stage 6 now closed, 1015 of 2715 registered riders have now dropped out. Lazy feckers!

 

[MrPie]

Wimps! Flogging stations 10-24 shoud be opened immediately and run around the clock until they have all been flogged at least twice!

Gonna shoot for 320 watts for Revolver and see what shakes. Will attempt 350watts for the other vids depending on feel, but I suspect the dial will need to be turned down at some point. Really tempted to go on the Saturday club run and save the sprint stage to Super Bowl Sunday.

Rich insomniac - nope. Scottish born & bred and have been posted to Houston, Texas for a spell. It gets bloody hot in the summer, but nothing a true Sufferlandrian can't handle. Went on a track day couple years back and tried out a F430 ad was non-plussed, so wouldn't waste my money. I do have a Mustang GT though .....typical tight Scotsman demaning bang-for-the-buck. When in Rome and all that.

 

[Bollo]

Wimps! Flogging stations 10-24 shoud be opened immediately and run around the clock until they have all been flogged at least twice!

We hold the same views on this matter.

Gonna shoot for 320 watts for Revolver and see what shakes. Will attempt 350watts for the other vids depending on feel, but I suspect the dial will need to be turned down at some point. Really tempted to go on the Saturday club run and save the sprint stage to Super Bowl Sunday.

Are you talking 320/350W FTP?! That hot Texas sun is working on your brain!

Rich insomniac - nope. Scottish born & bred and have been posted to Houston, Texas for a spell. It gets bloody hot in the summer, but nothing a true Sufferlandrian can't handle.

Went on a track day couple years back and tried out a F430 ad was non-plussed, so wouldn't waste my money. I do have a Mustang GT though .....typical tight Scotsman demaning bang-for-the-buck. When in Rome and all that.

Scotland to Houston and drives a mustang - oil business? Porsche man myself (garage queen Cayman in the .....err......garage).
I've heard Houston can get a bit steamy in the summer, but I'd swap it for Narnia outside at the moment.

To business! I need to knock up some pancakes for the nipper and then to the pain shed for my "date with eight". Good luck,

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England (and Scotland and Texas) now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

 

[Bollo]

Oh god, the humanity! That was f@&£!?g hard. Any world where violator counts as a rest is not somewhere I want to live.

I managed all three rides at 100%, saved by the kickr ramping on the shorter peaks as expected. Revolver was just stupid though. Four peaks in (@400W) and I wasn't sure I'd make the end of that, never mind the next two workouts.

 

[MrPie]

Sounds like you did well. We're you screamng for yo Mamma by the end? Really not relishing this one....so I went on the Saturday club run. We're off to see 'Monster Jam' trucks tonight so didn't want to be falling asleep half way through. Saving the trio for tomorrow as I don't mind sleeping through the super bowl.

320FTP? Good Lordy no; was thinking of smashing out the intervals at a target 320watts.....2nd thoughs, 350 with Revolver. I normally start revolver full of vim at 400 watts but quickly realise I have no talent, so dial it down to 360-380 after the 4th interval. By the end im in all sorts of mess. Feck knows how you get through 2.5 hours of sprinting.

Only one more to go for ya. Saddle up, MTFU and get your big boy pants on....go gettem tiger.

 

[MrPie]

....the Mustang is my daily driver! With petrol at 2 bucks / gallon for premium it's just madness; fuel economy just doesn't register here. So, 5.0 V8 420hp monster it is . Had a 1995 TVR Chimaera garage queen in the UK but sold her....along with the Maza 6 estate(!)....before moving to the States. Was toying with upgrading to the Shelby GT500 (when It eventually comes out) and having as the 'keep forever' car, but got no idea where the next job posting will be. Somewhere warm hopefully. Should be here for at least another couple years.

 

[Bollo]

It went well in the sense that it's in the past. I don't have the sprint vids and hadn't previously tried any of the workouts, so ignorance very quickly turned into a distinct lack of bliss. You'll love it. ISLAGIATT will seem like an 18-30 in comparison.

Monster trucks, Shelbys and the Super Bowl. Livin' the life Mr Pie, livin' the life!

 

[Bollo]

Done it all. Knackered now.

 

[MrPie]

Congrats Bollo! What was you total TSS for the 9 days? Kinda scared to look. Rest week perchance?

Procrastinating at the moment. quaffed down some PBJ toast and a cinnamon bagel to fuel for today's onslaught....they are obsessed with cinnamon over here....plus slug of coffee. Will prolly sod off to do the weekly shop next to let it all digest, then flogging station #1 will be open for business around 11am. We're talking survival and will need to keep my little darlings inside. Wiggle eventually delivered a nice pair of Castelli bibs which will make me go faster....everyone knows; the better you look, the faster you go.

 

[Bollo]

Thanks Mr P. I've just regained the power of arithmetic and my tour TSS runs in at 955! I usually go out for a ride on a Monday night but I might just give it a miss tomorrow. Weather says -1C so it's not a tough decision. I might just do a turbo session instead

ISLAGIATT is a ride I do quite a bit and usually find it ok. In terms of the profile, it ain't that different from riding the local humps and bumps around here. But after being softened up during the week and then hung, drawn and quartered yesterday, it turned into a bit of a bugger.

Castelli will make you look and feel like a dog with two d1cks! just make sure it gets good and shredded during stage 9.

My daughter skates with an American kid (dad in USAF) and I'm still getting over the shock that sweet potatoes and marshmallows is a thing. I quite like cinnamon though.

 

[Rob3rt]

Just a curiosity, what was the total duration and TSS that you both managed (I see Bollo clocked 955 TSS)? If you can also tell me the overall intensity factor (IF) that would be a bonus, since I am going to work it out otherwise

 

[Bollo]

Just a curiosity, what was the total duration and TSS that you both managed (I see Bollo clocked 955 TSS)? If you can also tell me the overall intensity factor (IF) that would be a bonus, since I am going to work it out otherwise

Quick bit of mental rithmatic says it was about 13 hrs in total, but if you're interested take a look at my TrainerRoad page, which I think is public.....

http://www.trainerroad.com/career/bollo

All rides from last Saturday onwards are part of the ToS.

I did the ToS on a kickr in ERG mode, which is why the actual and target powers match so well. Trainer Road scales the target power profiles based on FTP and the profile NP to give the fixed target IF as you'd expect.

I'm a bit of a stickler for calibration and usually to a spindown for the kickr before each ride. I'd left my FTP alone for a month because I didn't want any nasty surprises so close to the start of the tour.

One subtle but important point that I mentioned above is that the kickr ramps in power changes over a couple of seconds. This is the only reason that I could do the infamous stage 8 at 100% FTP scaling as the required power was attenuated significantly for the shorter sprints. Even then I was in bits by the end.

I'm just a bit of a MAMIL, but I'm also a physicist by training and a bit of a numbers geek. About two years back I started to write a multiplayer version of a Trainer Road, but dropped it a couple of months ago as I couldn't commit the time to turn it into a product and other more sophisticated and better funded things like Zwift were starting to appear on the market. What it did give me was a handle on how these numbers are calculated. I'm less good at the physiology end of things though ('cause biology is crap, right ). I currently work developing software for wholesale energy markets, so if you really want to be depressed, I can tell you how much the energy generated by these rides is worth (clue - the answer is in pence )

Sorry for the length, but I find this stuff interesting.

 

[Rob3rt]

Quick and dirty calculation of 13 hours with a TSS of 955 gives an IF of somewhere around 0.86. Give or take, granted I didn't add up the total time accurately yet, I will do later.

In comparison, I tend to average >1000 TSS per week, with an IF of ~0.83 (I do all of my none race riding on the turbo).

The reason I am interested is because your TSS for the challenge is not far from what I produce on a weekly basis, and at an intensity factor of only a few % difference, however I expect the way in which the TSS is produced (we could compare variability index as one indication) is what renders it none sustainable, whereas my method is sustainable. As such I recon my methods are better*, long term

*That's a joke!