chasm54

To be fair (and this relates to Ex's point about FTP being only one data point) the guy was a time-triallist and even with his massive VO2 max tended to get beaten (not by much) by the very top guys, because (the authors speculate) they were better at maintaining their aero position and had many more years of event-specific training.

And my own experience bears this out. I'm not training with power but occasionally get tested and at present probably have around 320w, which is more than 3.6w/kg. Not spectacular, but not too bad for a big old guy who hasn't been training systematically for very long, and still on the rise. I'm getting beaten by weaker riders on flat courses partly because they are better bike racers than I have yet become - they waste less of their strength - and partly because as yet that power does not translate into an ability to deal with the repeated attacks. I don't have the "snap" to surge and recover, surge and recover often enough to stay in contention. So - and this is where I absolutely buy the point about specificity - my principal focus at present is much more about intensity than volume, with a lot of criss-cross intervals and the like.

I'm just interested in what balance of activity is likely to give the best results in the longer term and wonder whether experimenting with periodisation over much longer timeframes might allow one to continue to get stronger over a longer period. So, maintaining low-intensity volume during the race season may almost certainly injure my race results this year, but it may (may it? this is my question) maintain and build my base fitness better than would reduced volume and higher intensity, and thus give me a bigger platform to train further during the winter and build for next year. Just musing, really, and heavily influenced by my touring background. I don't think I have ever felt as strong as I did after a two-month tour during which I spent 25-30 hours per week on the bike at low intensity. At the end of it I was riding away from people I couldn't previously live with.

All of which may just be an argument for investing more time in base during the winter, of course. And let's face it, in the long term we are all dead. So it might have been an idea to think about training with a focus on the long-term before I reached the age of 58!