Originally Posted by
grolby
In the case of people like myself, probably Kolie, and possibly Sam, the fact that we have such a large anaerobic contribution to our power production in "endurance" time frames like 20' likely has a lot to do with it. I also really lose a lot of my ability to produce sprint or anaerobic power after a couple hours. Most likely because I'm tapping into it a lot more than you are. So I can climb pretty well for 20', but after that I'm basically empty. I still haven't figured out what to do about this, or have even necessarily determined to my full satisfaction that it's what's happening because damn it I want to be good at these races.
how often do you train at intensity for >20'? i.e., you can work on pushing your ability to sustain pace/effort to 21', 22', etc., just as you can raise your anaerobic capacity so that your present-day 20' capability puts less a toll on you.
if i were your coach, i'd also start wondering about your vo2max (can estimate that from data sets) -- and perhaps more importantly
inability to sprint after a few hours also makes me curious about your fueling during the event. could be that you are simply just spent because you were operating at too high an intensity, or it could be something missing nutritionally.
if we had some lactate testing on you, we could also see how efficient (or not) you are at sub-LT (which gets ignored by many), and then my bet is we'd be working to push that out a bit. if we can delay tapping into your reserves (your sprint sounds pretty good), then you may actually have it to push up and over that climb or jump out of a break at the end of a race.
all of this is just some musings based on reading a few of your posts and talking about where i might look for clues, which could then be addressed through training. i obviously don't know you/your training history, so i'm sure there is something i'm missing or new information that you'll provide which could invalidate all the above.