FTP Test Day: 253W

FTP Test Day

I ran an FTP test today. If you're not familiar, FTP stands for Functional Threshold Power, roughly the average watts you can hold for an hour of hard effort. It's the number that anchors everything in structured training. The higher it is relative to your body weight (measured as W/kg, watts per kilogram), the better your fitness on the bike.

The format was two back-to-back Peloton rides: a 10-minute warm-up to get the legs going, then a 20-minute all-out test effort. The warm-up averaged 124W and felt fine. Then the test started.

Twenty minutes at maximum sustainable effort is not fun. It's a controlled suffer. You're trying to find the ceiling and hold it, which means you're uncomfortable from about minute two onward and you're making a lot of small decisions about whether to back off. I didn't back off.

The Numbers

• FTP (today): 253W
• FTP (when I started this block): 216W
• Peak FTP ever: 295W (July 2022)
• Weight: 209.8 lbs
• W/kg (today): 2.66
• W/kg (when I started): 2.27

That's 37 watts of improvement since I started posting about this training block. I'm still about 42 watts below my all-time peak, and W/kg is still under 3.0, but the direction is right and the rate of change is faster than I expected at this point.

For context on why W/kg matters for a 135-mile ride: the Bay loop has real climbing in it. The hills on the north and south ends don't care what your raw watts are, they care about how much power you're making relative to how much you weigh. Getting that number up, even a little, makes the hard sections survivable in a way that raw fitness alone doesn't.

What This Changes

A new FTP means my training zones shift up. The workouts that were hard before are now baseline, and the harder efforts dial in at higher targets. That's the point. Every test is a recalibration.

August 29th is 34 days away. I'm not where my peak was in 2022, but I'm meaningfully better than I was four months ago when I posted that first number. The training block is working. The consistency is showing up in the data.

Next up is getting more volume in, longer outdoor rides, and managing the taper as we get inside the final few weeks. I'll keep posting the numbers as they come, including the weeks where nothing goes right.

If you've been reading along and wondering whether you could build to something like 135 miles around the Bay, this is what the answer looks like in practice. Not a highlight reel. Just an FTP test on a Sunday afternoon, one data point at a time.

Come ride with me. TheBayRide.com has all the details.

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