Last year was my second year cycling and it was a very good year.
Max 1740 watt
5 sec 1668 watt
1 min. 734 watt
FTP 352 watt
95-97 kg over the year.
Biggest day on the bike was 5000 KJ in 185 kilometers and sprinting got me up to 58 km/h without a lead out.
So After a year of training I wanted to take some time off to get my mind fresh for a new year of going hard. Twee weeks of the bike got me more then hungry again and hoped back on.
Started out with a week at sweet spot heart rate and the power started to come back to me. after three week of training I’m at 345 ftp again and gaining.
My sprint numbers are not so great tho
max 1379 watt
5 sec. 1318 watt
Still reaching 57 km/h over 20 seconds with nearly the same 20 second avg. power as last year.
I got a new bike with mtb/spd pedals maybe that’s but I’m lost.
Fitness is on a continuum - the longer it takes to build the longer it takes to lose (think base fitness) and the quicker it is to build the quicker you lose it (think anarobic or sprint efforts)
You’re fine, you haven’t been training it but you can get the super high end back in a couple of weeks
Unrelated to your question - you’d be a crusher if you could lose some weight, any way to get to 75 kg?
Well that was what I thought as well. But I never trained my sprint it was just there. I’d do one or two every other week and it was just there now it’s not.
Weight is a thing tho. new season goal was 20w/kg but that changed real quick.
And getting down to 75 will never be possible for me. 85 is a maybe but I like life to much to not have too much food on a Saturday night get together.
Having a high max wattage is very different from being able to dish out max wattage on command.
Power is product of force x cadence. Everybody’s preferred sprint cadence is slightly different. You get peak numbers when you have a perfect combination of being in the right gear, having the right amount of resistance (wind and/or gradient), and a lead into the sprint at the right speed so you don’t have to shift gears.
Max speed wins the race, not max wattage, so more than likely your peak numbers should be achieved during training. Find a shallow gradient hill, preferably with a downhill lead in, that you can use for sprint training. Consistent benchmarking requires you to minimize variables, terrain being the biggest one.
You seem to be comparing your “best of the year” numbers against your “best of the last three weeks,” or perhaps even just “best of my last ride” numbers. Don’t do that. Especially for very short durations, which can be due to (or at least distorted by) noisy data.
