So, just watched the latest vid from Norcal Cycling where they dropped it that EJ went from an FTP of 190 as a straight up first time biker to an FTP of 330+ in less than a season. Then he proceeds to almost steal an Alviso practice crit win in his first ever crit against guys of the caliber of Jeff Linder. That is insane. He’s going to demolish some Cat 5’s in the coming weeks. This is unreal.
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Appears as though he won his first race yesterday rather handily. Then turned around and got second in the Cat 4 race. He’s going to be running through these lower categories.
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Is he the guy that used TR to train?
Wow, 14 hours a week? There’s nothing in TR that’s even close to that load.
No. 2nd season is a different guy. It’s his video editor. Last summer he expressed interest in racing, so this fall he started riding a bunch, trying to lose weight before starting structured training. He lost like 60 lbs since last summer and now is apparently a beast.
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LOL, so does that mean the season is over? 
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Back when I raced, I saw a lot of guys blow through cat 5 or even cat 4 and then stall out in 3s and in one case 2s. If you have a naturally high VO2max, you can power through races in the lower categories without racing skill. Then you ride with other racers of your natural ability who have skill and then the learning curve gets a whole lot steeper.
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Maybe they turn it into a Cat 5 to Cat 2 thing like Nate did? Or just focus on his FTP gains? Ethan did say a stretch goal was for him to double his initial FTP. So from 190 → 380. That’d be wild. Who knows?
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yeah, no doubt, his skills are lacking experience and that he won the race likely on brute strength. Not to bad of a gig though to be editing Jeff’s races to learn tactics quickly. I’m sure he will struggle at some point, but I thought it was pretty amazing. I was expecting him to say 250 watts or something like that.
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Do you know me or something? I went 5 —->2 and then got the “welcome to the real racing” wake up call about 15 years ago. Although I did know what was coming since in trained with multiple P-1-2s at the time. Raced a few times, never got comfortable in the group (didn’t really try to), and just backed off of that and focused on triathlon and TTs.
If you don’t have that ability to train with people significantly better than you, getting into that first P12 race would be a massive shocker. Still amazes me people are comfortable bumping shoulders at 45kph…… no thanks.
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I’ve really enjoyed the series on Norcal 2 in general. He’s pretty positive and putting in the work, I commented that they should cover his watts per kg increase because with the giant FTP increase and the large weight loss he may already have doubled it.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go back to my 225 and hope I can get to 240 on the next detection.
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How much does he weigh?
Very impressive. Jeff also has that masterclass… 
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About 82kg I believe because his FTP was 353W and the screenshot indicated that was 4.3w/kg
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Spoiler alert lol
Kudos to the guy if all the numbers are correct.
He seems like a very likable character, but I cant help but feeling slightly reserved about the reported gains, as we dont know the accuracy of the numbers, and he and Jeff is after all promoting a product, the very expensive Masterclass.
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I think he has quite an athletic background so has a good starting point and the ever useful good genes!
Bloody good effort regardless, will have taken some good input on his side. Now if only I could see the same!
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Regardless of the ftp, he almost won Alviso. The gains are legit if he can go from couch to alviso.
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Absolutely, its a great accomplishment, not taking that away from him, no matter how much gains he has made.
It’s a weird situation of being super motivating but at the same time super demoralizing. Like, you look at him and be like, wow look at the gains! Then think, man I’ve been training for 5x that long and don’t have anywhere near those gains. What have I been doing wrong? I’ll just blame it on genetics and my busy work schedule that only lets me ride 8 hours a week.
Props to him though, that’s quite the achievement. I’ll be over here in the corner sulking.
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