Dave, your estimated power seems too low for generous pizza portions riding on gravel. Rolling resistance alone would be a high percentage of that estimate and a power meter would be very useful.
Ramp test is just another way to make a fun activity hurt more than it should. I won't... not on a trainer... not for some training program designed by someone who has never met me. My coach would have nixed a test like that after 100mi on gravel in favour of time to recover.
And FWIW, I did an FTP and VO2 test last week that was bad enough...
Worse, I did it while watching a group of Ua girls on the track. Dammit! Those are fast and fun sessions. Go 'til you blow, sit up on the stayer's line for a couple of laps to recover then come back for more. Their pace is well in the 50s now - NCGCC are faster though
. I could have rebelled, but I was with a group for another video in the pregnancy and sport series.
The next day we were doing sprint and recovery intervals. Z1 to 15s sprint, recovery to Z1 and repeat. I did that after real world intervals doing 10s surges off corners, about 22 of them on Turini in the morning. Lots of drone footage. After 12 cycles on the trainer my legs were jelly! Massage, a long hot soak and lots of food.
That track work seems fun - wish we had something like that here. Do you bring your own track bike, or just rent one there?
I have to be honest about our 'gravel' here: it's "hero gravel" where it can be some of the easiest gravel to ride on. The challenge often isn't the gravel causing a wattage drain, but instead since the gravel levees are so much higher than anything around them for miles it is the wind exposure that takes a toll. I'm out of shape and I know it, so a lower FTP is believable. In recovering from what all I went through earlier this year, the loss of the Kona with its 2x system has been a detriment to training. I no longer can get into a really tough gear and push it out, so I lost that style of training that kept my legs strong. Sure, I can put the SRAM 1x in its toughest gear, but I easily get that going too fast, and I lose out on that resistance training. I used to have nice over-1000 watt surges that I can no longer easily practice for.
So for your sprint and recovery intervals, do you really allow the heart rate to settle all the way down to Z1 before the next 15 second sprints? I have head that that is the goal, but for me that would be about 101 bpm to get to zone 1, and that would take a while to get back down to. Though, with the limited 1x gravel gearing I'm dealing with now, it will sort of force me to ride in some ridiculously easy gear at some ridiculously slow speed in order to do a 20 second sprint up through the gears. Without doing that I'd likely run out of gears if we didn't have a good headwind.
Ramp test is just another way to make a fun activity hurt more than it should. I won't... not on a trainer... not for some training program designed by someone who has never met me. My coach would have nixed a test like that after 100mi on gravel in favour of time to recover.
Ah, but that's the catch. I was doing much better until a poor decision here at work cut my earnings, so that autonomous 'coach' of TrainerRoad is my defacto (inexpensive) coach, and I'm thankful for what it is. Cheap coach is better than no coach to a degree or three, agree?
Perhaps it isn't TrainerRoad's fault with the ramp test as that was the morning I entered in a new 'goal,' into a new training regimen, and perhaps it just needed an updated baseline to develop a path toward that goal. My guess is that, had I not created a new regimen (me, not knowing what I was doing with it as it was the first time I ever entered a goal... and I deleted the prior training regimen after creating the new one), it would not have ramp-tested me that morning. As much as I didn't like it, I DID like it because, hey, after an easy century the day before, a ramp test doesn't take a long time, lol. Well, it wouldn't, but I'm experienced enough to know that the little five-minute warm-up for anything like a ramp test is fine for young people, but for me - I did an easier 30-minute 'workout' spin that I found in TrainerRoad just to warm up and get the legs moving before doing the ramp test's warm-up and climbing intervals.
I mean, even on a good day if it takes me 10 miles to warm up before I can really start riding, five minutes of easy spinning warm-up before a ramp test seems to be ludicrous.