Hey all, I just got my first power meter three days ago, and I had a mountain bike race yesterday. I have been training on my own with heart rate and doing intervals that sort of thing. I had a good recovery week last week and tapered a bit for this race. I feel that I paced pretty well and was wondering if I could use this in place of an ftp test since I’m not very good at going hard without competition. The race was about an hour and three minutes and I got an average power of 200w. My normalized power, however, was 232w. Which value should I use? Should I meet somewhere in the middle? I am a junior and I weigh about 135 lbs if that helps. Thanks
Congrats on the new PM.
If you don’t like going hard without competition then I would stick with the 200 number and see how that feels during your workouts. That is, presuming you are using TR for you workouts. If you use your race day pace to set your workouts and don’t like to push too hard outside of racing, that might not be a good combination.
You will likely get a variety of recommendations (such as take a ramp test) but that’s my $.02.
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Assuming you raced hard, I can’t see how likely bursts over FTP mixed in with all sorts of riding represents FTP unless by coincidence.
If this is for an estimated FTP to use on a trainer even less so as indoors there are some significant changes to consider (cooling, rigid bike, plus the stimulation of a race).
It might be close enough, it might not.
Do a ramp test, compete with yourself to see if you can beat that outdoor number.
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As an aside, I’d be interested to know which PM you have?
Neither of those numbers is your ftp, but the NP might be come a bit closer. Do a proper ftp test to find out what number to train with.
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It’s the Quarq XX1. If you do buy it though you have to buy the specific quarq XX1 crankset as its not the same as SRAMs normal directmount system. I think msrp is a little over a grand USD if anyone is interested
Thanks. I’ll give that a shot in a few days
Yeah unless this MTB race included a 20+ minutes all out steady state effort then I’d say it would be pretty hard to get a valid FTP number from it. Even if it was really hard, there is just too much variability in the way that people can handle anaerobic efforts to be able to extract FTP.
Thank you all. I ended up doing my first ramp test today. I got 232! I know that’s not a lot, but I’m excited to finally start using tr and better myself as a cyclist! Thanks for your advice!
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Did you get 232 because in your head you wanted to get to at least 232? Welcome to the mental game 
Yeah I’ve even done that mountain bike race that did have a 20 min+ steady state climb. My Garmin made me feel good that day with a higher than expected FTP estimate. Pretty sure most training advice would be to ignore that result and do a focused “real” test though. Still gave me a mental boost that day as the race results did not. 
Oops. It was actually 237! But I wasn’t thinking about the other numbers. I actually don’t know how the algorithm works. I was just thinking about not imploding due to fatigue
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