Yeah, it depends. Base is likely going to be a part of any successful road racer's training recipe, from whatever the hell I am, to someone like Cavandish. While Cav's threshold doesn't dominate relative to others, that doesn't tell us how important FTP development or maintenance is to his program. Surely he's got a huge focus on the AWC and ATP stuff though -- keeping his strengths maximized.
As a critter myself, my best season ever had a nice 6-week base combined with a viciously aggressive weight loss cycle. Followed that up with a pretty straightforward build and specificity phase, maybe 6 weeks of threshold stuff (both push and pull workouts), then 9 weeks of VO2Max moving into 1' intervals and sprints, while maintaining some threshold training in there once/week (again push some, pull some). Who will this work for? WR in 2009, but apparently not any other time. The only pieces of that I haven't replicated are the weight loss and the results -- I'm thinking about that for my next base block though...
Last edited by waterrockets; 11-09-13 at 09:16 PM.