IRONMAN Bike Pacing: Power Guidance, Your TSS Budget, Outdoor FTP & Gearing for a Strong Run | Ep 595

All right, let's get into this week's episode then.

So first question, how hard can I ride my bike in the Ironman bike leg? And it's a much more complicated answer than you think it might be.

So the nuance of this is the longer that your expected bike split is going to be, the lower the percentage of your FTP you're going to have to ride at.

So if you compare two athletes, if we've got one athlete who's going to be completing the bike leg in eight hours and one person who's a pro who might be finished off the bike in four hours, Because there's such a variance in how long they're actually going to be riding the bike for, you can't ride the bike at the same intensity.

So one of the mistakes we often see age groupers make is they read stories, see Instagram stories, they watch videos of pro triathletes racing and they might hear, you know, this particular pro athlete rode the bike like a... 84% of FTP, 82% of FTP.

And then assume that they can backwards work those numbers and say, right, well, if this pro athlete that I really admire rides up 82% of FTP, then I should be able to ride about the same thing.

And the challenge is they're finished with the bike, like much, much faster.

So they can afford to work at a relatively higher percentage of their fitness.

If you're out there for much longer, you've obviously got to ride a relatively much lower percentage of your fitness in order to be able to run well off the bike still.

Now, the way we sum all this up, there's a number we can access in TrainingPeaks called TSS or Training Stress Score.

And all that does is it normalizes how tired you get across a period of time, essentially.

It looks at how long you are working out for and how hard you are working out for relative to FTP.

And it gives you... a kind of standardized score.

And essentially, if you were to ride your bike for an hour at 100% of FTP, you'll score 100 points.

If you were to ride your bike really easily outdoors at conversational pace, you'd probably score about 50 points.

So, That gives you a kind of feeling for how the training stress score works.

Essentially, it's a score out of 100.

If you ride your bike at 100% of FTP for an hour, in theory, you're completely done after that hour and you need to stop and lie down and have a rest.

See, that's no good to you if you're doing an Ironman bike leg and you need to be out there anywhere between, let's say, four and a half hours for our faster age groupers all the way through to perhaps eight hours for people at the other end.

We need to have this budget.

And what we've seen across time is that number 280... is really useful no matter no matter how fit and fast you are that's the budget you're working with so that you can still run well off the bike so obviously our pro athlete that we mentioned might be done in the bike like in four hours they might be riding 80 plus percent of ftp but they're still going to accumulate around that 280 tss score

all the

way through to the athlete who's taking eight hours on the bike leg.

If I've actually got to, you know, they're going to be accumulating many less points in the hour than the pro athlete is, but they're still working within the same budget in order to be able to run well off the bike.

So all of these numbers are assuming something important.