Looks like Peter has already picked up my improved time for the spreadsheet.
For Tuesday's run I went straight from a morning full of meetings and no breakfast onto the bike. Thankfully for the first time in ToW I didnt have massive dropouts and I was able to start normally. I hung out in the 300s (out of ~1000) for a while, but by the 4th lap I was starting to fade and just hoping to finish in the upper half. By the last couple laps I was toast and was just holding on. I was probably somewhere around 700 out of 1k. Clearly cooked it too hard early with a massive fade. I wasn't able to hold any wheels those last couple laps. Interestingly enough got a FTP update to 221, which is right about where I figured I was.
I tried harder to start a bit more slowly for Thursday and it paid off -- I was over a minute faster and was holding wheels through to the end. Finished in the upper half on the road and better on power. Given the avg power was just under FTP and normalized was just over there's probably not a lot more of time for me to squeeze out of this stage.
WRT excuse ratings and such. Not sure if I'm honored or insulted about being mentioned in that subthread :-) Not sure how much of my lungs the embolisms damaged and I'm missing about 25% of my left kidney at this point. I do know that I'm still ~35W down from where I was this time last year when I was setting PBs all over the place. and looking to move into B. I'm still hoping to return to that form , but it's clearly a slowwwww process.