So I was doing an epic gravel route yesterday that had multiple 25’+ minute climbs spread out over the 6.5 hr day. During the first 3 hrs, I was fine keeping power in upper sweetspot on the first 3 climbs, but during later climbs, one at 3000KJ in the legs and one at 3900KJ in the legs…tempo was all I had left. Was eating 80+ gram of carbs an hour, energy was good)
My question is - How trainable is it to keep being able to put out upper SST or low ZN4 watts after a solid amount of KJ in the legs. Or is there a limit and a drop is going to happen no mater the training you do.
The answer is both! You are going to get tired after that much riding but it is highly, HIGHLY trainable to not get as tired. “Fatigue resistance” is the buzzword.
‘as tired’ being the operable way of describing it.
We even have athletes train specific to the demands:
go out and ride 3,500kJ’s then do 2 x 20 sweet spot or threshold for example.
The Classic Alpe D’Huez workout is ride 3,000kJ’s and then go do a 20 minute climb as fast and as hard as possible to simulate the Tour stages/
Takes time and a LOT of riding to build fatigue resistance.
A workout I like to give to athletes is doing a ~4+ hour Zone 2 ride but doing a 20 minute sweet spot effort in the first hour and one right at the end. Goal is trying to hold similar power on the last one as the first one. As endurance improves we should see not only similar power but also heart rate that is closer to the first as well. Just a way to track progress and train this ‘fatigue resistance’