Yeah, I know, everybody brags about large gains in a short amount of time.  Drop 10 pounds in 4 weeks, realize 10 percent on your investment in only 90 days and so on.  However, this is a post of what happened and not what someone hopes you will believe can happen so that you will purchase a product.  I will also give you the product for free because I found it amidst my searching for a free training plan.

Backstory:  I had a disappointing year on the bike.  I did not hit any of my goals during my races on the bike, and this was annoying because biking is usually my strongest discipline.  I can attribute it to a few things, or in other words give excuses, but plain and simple I just want to be faster on the bike.  So during my down month of October, I scoured the world wide web to find a PDF version of a training plan that I could carry out on my trainer during November and December.  Hunter Allen graciously made available such a plan.  Here is the link: Hunter Allen Wheelbuilder Training Plan.

I won’t bore you with the details of the workouts, but I followed it to the letter.  I think I only missed one workout, and hit every single interval.  I developed programed workouts from my Garmin Connect account that would step me through each interval of each workout.  Before I started the plan I did a 20 min FTP test and after the 8 weeks I did the same test again.  The data from the column on the right in the image below is the test done before the plan and the one on the left is the one after it.  I train on a Kurt Kinetic Road Trainer and with some back-end-calculations I obtain virtual power with the help from the following information from the vendor’s website:

The formula for the Road Machine is a cubic function. If we let S stand for “speed” in miles per hour, and P stand for “power” in watts, the formulas are as follows:

P = (5.244820) * S + (0.019168) * S3

For example, to calculate how much power is produced at a speed of 16.1mph while riding the Kinetic Road Machine, plug 16.1 in for “S.”


P = (5.244820) * (16.1) + (0.019168) * (16.1)3

P = (5.244820) * (16.1) + (0.019168) * (16.1) * (16.1) * (16.1)
P = 84.4416 + 79.9935

Power = 164.435 watts

For November 4th the average power calculated from the average speed for the 20 minute test was 235 watts.  The protocol stipulates that your FTP is 95% of that number or 223 watts.  On January 3rd the average power was 266 watts which produces an FTP of 252 watts.

BOoyah!  I know I still have a ways to go to get my FTP to where I want it (>275), but gaining that 13 percent puts me back to where I think I was mid-summer during my best year to date.  Not bad for a free training plan.