Watts per heartbeat falls across every ride — but not for the reason you'd expect. Your hard rides hold up better than your easy ones, because on an easy ride you open at tempo power and spend the next ten miles settling back down.
Every logged ride, month by month. Bar height is Strava’s Relative Effort; each week closes with its own totals. Lifts from Strava show as solid grey pills. Tap any day with something on it and it opens under the week — rides graded against the session they were meant to be, lifts set by set with the weight against last time. Each week row carries that week’s planned sessions as dashed pills, in the order they should be dropped if the week goes badly — no days attached, do them when sleep and work allow. Tap a pill and it opens up: what to do before, how it should feel, what to do if it is going badly, and what to check afterwards. Once a logged ride or lift fits one, it is struck through.
Written down 23 Sep 2026 so the reasoning survives. Every number below the goals is derived from them — if a goal changes, the plan changes with it.
Where the numbers stand, where they should be at the end of Block 2, and what Category 5 capability actually asks for. The last column is two to four years away, not one.
| Measure | Now | Mar 2027 | Cat 5 ready | Why it is on the list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weeks unbroken | best 3 | 26 | — | Goal 1. Nothing else matters if this fails. |
| Longest gap | 79 days | under 6 days | — | Goal 1. A short ride keeps the chain; a skipped one does not. |
| FTP | 157 W · 2.0 W/kg | 185–200 W | 255–280 W | The platform everything else sits on. |
| 5-min power | 184 W | 230–240 W | 300–330 W | Goal 3. The attack itself. |
| Sprint, 5 s | 814 W | 900–950 W | 1,100 W+ | Goal 3. The kick that makes a split stick. Read it loosely — a single meter spike can set a 5-second number. |
| Sprint, 30 s | 428 W | 470–500 W | 600–630 W | Goal 3. The honest sprint figure, and the one that actually drops a wheel — a jump long enough to open real daylight. |
| 1-min power | 351 W | 380–400 W | 450 W+ | Goal 3. What the local climbs actually ask for — Punkatasset and Pantry Road are 60–90 seconds. |
| 20 min ÷ 60 min | 144% | under 125% | under 112% | Goal 4. The flatness of the right-hand end. The single best measure of the engine. |
| Decoupling | 15–19% | under 8% | under 5% | Durability. Whether the punch is still there at mile 30. |
| Cadence | 70 rpm | 82–85 | 85–90 | Serves goals 1 and 4 at once: less force per stroke through the knee, and less of the big-gear bias. |
| Carbs on the bike | none | 60 g/hour | 90 g/hour | Goal 2. The gut is the thing being trained, not just the legs. |
| Longest ride | 26 mi | 50 mi+ | 60–80 mi | Grows by time, never by watts. |
| Repeatability | untested | effort 4 within 10% of effort 1 | — | Goal 3. Unmeasured, because solo endurance rides never ask for it. Test in spring: 4 × 90 s hard, 60 s between. |
Eight weeks. One job: bring the right-hand end of the power curve up, without breaking the chain. Everything else waits.
No fixed days — golf lands Sat/Sun and the range takes weekday evenings, so sessions move. What does not move is the order they get sacrificed in. Drop from the bottom up, never the top down.
| Priority | Session | Target | Why it ranks there |
|---|
Where sessions cannot go, given eighteen holes is four hours on your feet.
Answer three things before deciding the session. Two or more amber, downgrade it. This is the mechanism that keeps a bad night from becoming a lost month.
| Reading | Long ride | Hard ride | Legs |
|---|
The long ride grows by time only, never by watts. Everything else holds steady. Week 4 and week 8 are deloads and are not optional.
| Wk | Starts | Long ride | Approx | Rides | Lifts | Focus |
|---|
All three are measurable on the Watts tab. Re-check at week 8, not before.
Heat and fluid work sits outside this block deliberately — there is little hot golf left, adaptations fade in 2–4 weeks, and the heat episodes want a medical answer first. Drinking practice still happens on every long ride.
For a given kind of ride, are the mile blocks improving — and is that watts going up, or heart rate coming down? The chart carries the shape; every number is in the matrix beneath it.
| Window |
|---|
Power and heart rate, each indexed to its own segment 1, so you can see which one gives way first. A ride counts toward every segment it finishes — ride 6 miles and you are in 0–5 but not 5–10 — so the ride count falls as the segments get deeper. Watch the n values. Filter to Endurance for outdoor rides only; All includes trainer sessions, which flatten the curve because they have no terrain.
Watts per beat averaged over the previous three miles of road, plotted by mile, so you can see where a ride comes apart. Same three windows as above: the last ride marches, the last 30 days is the solid average, the last 365 days is the shaded floor.
The most watts you held for a set stretch in each ride, from Strava’s best efforts. Slide from five seconds to an hour. Eight minutes is the interval the block is built on, so it is the default; the short end shows the sprint, the long end the engine.
Every 5-mile block of every ride. The two rolling columns hold each segment against the trailing 30 days of that same segment, so you can see whether a ride beat its own recent baseline.
| Date | Ride | Type | Segment | Avg W | Avg HR | W/bpm | vs seg 1 | Rolling 30d | 30d vs seg 1 | Decoupling |
|---|