201 difficulty score.
That is raising the bar
this breakthrough caught me by surprise, i have been struggling with the heat lately, still working my way up to 100% heat acclimation on my garmin so training has been somewhat short of my expectation.
today i went out for an easy ride with a friend and he wanted to visit a particular hill, my PB was very close to 5 mins so it shoud make for a nice 5 minute effort. i went a few seconds ahead so we’re not in each other’s wheels i felt i had good legs so i gave it a good effort but i faded away before reaching the top so i was quite unhappy with my effort. then i arrived home and its amazing how xert predicted the exact moment i should reach my limit which turns out to give me a 3 minute power PB. this platform is awesome.
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Aa\mazing effort Reuben! Not only did it show your limit once, but twice 
Did you have MPA displayed live on your bike computer?
unfortunately no i my computer is a wahoo, but i wear a fenix which has the MPA data field, when im at my limit the last thing i want to do is look at my watch though lol, maybe i should let my handlebar wear it next time
I decided to try for a breakthrough during a Zwift Fun is Fast event. It was a the La Reine climbing route. My legs felt good and I felt good myself. My plan was to go hard a little early for a break through then ease and ride at comfortable pace until the last mile or so. I was expecting a bump in my FTP, but got an HIE bump. Should I have dragged my early effort out for a slow burn on my MPA? I’m happy regardless because I felt great aerobically and wasnt hurting as bad as i thought I would be.
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I’d have to take a closer look at the data. On first look, a difficulty score of > 175 is likely impossible with an accurate signature, so I would expect that your threshold is actually a little bit higher.
If you go to Advanced MPA, you can try adding ~5 W to your threshold and then clicking REFRESH to see what the activity analysis would look like if your threshold was 5W higher. You would also find that the accumulated XSS and max difficulty score would drop quite a bit as well, since MPA wouldn’t drop as low & as long. Hopefully that makes sense!
That totally make sense and when I saw the breakthrough on my Fenix, I was like this feels to easy to accomplish and it through a flag in my head. Attached is picture with 5 watts and a refresh. My next question is should I extract or save or both? @ManofSteele
(I run that parallel when zwifting)
Ahh, that MPA chart looks a lot more reaslistic.
Clicking Extract (when MPA and power are very close/touching) will let the system attempt to extract the exact signature. In your case, this wouldn’t really be desired, since the extraction would return the exact signature of the BT. By clicking ‘Save’, the system saves the signature exactly as you’ve input - this is the option that you’d like to select.
I hit it a couple of times on Zwift the past few days to test myself. First was a short sprint race about 20 min in length. Intense to start and up the KOM, then eased up on the downside until the sprint. The second I was going pretty chill and did all out up the Yorkshire KOM. Amazing breakthroughs, but I’m always skeptical of huge jumps. I feel great and Xert FTP estimation hasn’t failed me yet. I stopped FTP testing because it was always within a few watts. The results are amazing and welcomed. Maybe I’ll test them out this week.
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Training is going to get harder now!
Got some feedback from Scott. He recommended flagging the huge jump because that drastic decrease in HIE. Then if the next breakthrough mimics that we can re evaluate.
Been a few weeks, but got another one. Still gaining on recovery. Though I might be flagging this one.
My main ride is a dual 700c recumbent. That’s where my BTs have been this year, doing TT efforts on the 'bent. But I also have a 'cross bike that I enjoy taking on the local canal roads and a couple dirt climbs.
I’ve been riding the CX a bit more recently and the other day took it up a local hill trail. The 32/28 low gear was barely enough for my power, but I pushed a bit harder than needed and got a BT partway up the climb. Kept the power on and cracked right after the last switchback, about 150’ from the summit. (the gray in the image is altitude, not difficulty)
But why flag it? Well… the difference in power production between recumbent and upright. I’m still not sure how exactly they compare. I’ve had this before, where I’ll use a BT on the 'cross bike to realize the fitness is there, flag the activity, and then about a week later go out and try for a BT on the recumbent.
And also this was almost a 10% increase in TP. 16w gain, from 173 to 189.
This one is three months after completing my 120 days at 100% experiment.
IR has been set to Maintenance for the last couple months with outdoor rides comprising over half of my weekly hours.
Recently I set Program Type to Challenge then followed the instructions to verify results at the end of the 30 days with a BT activity. I used Under Pressure, my favorite BT workout completed in Slope mode.
The second sprint was because I didn’t feel I maxed out the prescribed sprint interval and wanted to verify that, but I waited too long (MPA recovery) to jump again and have an affect on the outcome.
To boost my XSS for the day I completed the BT workout, left EBC running, used Filter to add Heartbreaker to same activity, changed back to AUTO mode, skipped the warm-up, and rode another 35 minutes.
Some portion of the TP bump is no doubt due to optimal decay after my last BT event (over two months ago). At this point I’m likely close to my TP ceiling for the season unless I’m able to boost TL in the fall.
Not sure how to best evaluate the results of a challenge, but if I compare the Ranking tab with a screenshot I took before starting the challenge, watts increased by 12 pts for the selected focus duration, and ranking improved by 6%.
Oh, and I’m still completing 99% of recommended workouts at 100% difficulty.
My nemesis is any VO2max workout that has too much red/orange with too little blue in between. 
For example: Xert - Workout Designer (xertonline.com) Got through the 4x6’s intact, but the 3x8’s were no friggin way. YMMV
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Breakthrough rides are so much easier outside. Inside and outside rides are like yin and yang. Inside it’s mentally taxing to do hard efforts and easy to do easy efforts. Outside it’s difficult to take it easy and all-to-easy to go hard at all times. Is it the same with others? Possibly it comes from 15 years of racing mountain bikes.
Welcome to Xert - nice breakthrough!
Riding hard is fun & rewarding, isn’t it?
TP has been yoyoing recently, I can pretty much guarantee a BT on the Seiler 4x8 workout, almost like playing a game, getting to the end of the 3rd or 4th interval and going back to the start and increasing the resistance for however long I can be bothered.
Different story when outside though, have broken a load of PRs on local climbs but never get a BT and usually get a fakethough with a few watts deducted but always feel I’m well over the limit at the end of the outdoor efforts as opposed to the indoor ones.
The outdoor efforts are typically 3 - 6 minute efforts separated by varying amounts of minutes getting to the next climb which may have some bearing on this.
Anyway here’s today’s BT on the 4x8
Zwift crit-city 16 laps. Relatively new to xert from TR (converted 2 weeks ago or so), fitness signature was a bit low coming off of a ~3 week ‘active recovery break’ after completing their sweet-spot base high-volume 1 & 2.
Felt good to actually get out and stretch the legs oppose to being pinned at 92% FTP, interesting to see the MPA line compared to RPE as that’s about right I think, HR was pinned at 180bpm for the entire race so a tiny bit of room to move.
The only thing now is that even though I’m in the middle of build, I’m constantly ‘tired’ so just getting endurance rides.
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