Cardiac Drift Test

I decided to try carrying out a cardiac drift test yesterday, to complement the MAPs I have been doing.

Logic is that these should provide an indication of how my aerobic capacity is faring. Given that's the most important for the events I ride makes sense to see if I can check it.

So did a relatively simple test. Set my Lifecycle to Watts, 200W for 40 mins, put on an episode of the Sopranos and pedalled until the credits came up (50mins or so later so got a warm down in as well.). Reason I chose 200W is that it is towards the higher end of my endurance zone of 157W-212W calculated a la Coggan from an FTP of 280W.

Then looked at the HR curve, treating the first 10 mins as a warm up then looking at the next half hour breaking it down into 2 chunks of 15 mins.

Result below (Y axis 110-140bpm):

Shows that in fact took me about 25 mins to get me warmed up then flattened out around 137 bpm (about 75% of my MHR c. 182) So will take out from this:

• My 157W-212W estimate of my endurance zone is in the right area but maybe a little low.
• I should plan to redo the test watching a couple of episodes and see how much my HR changes once I have fully warmed up
• I will try again but in my tempo (213W-254W) zone.