Why You Are Faster Than Your FTP

The Truth About Power, Durability and What Really Wins on Race Day

Increasing your power matters. No serious triathlete ever pretended otherwise. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t spent enough time suffering on a bike. Strength is not just vanity in this sport; it’s currency. Building that engine gives you range. It gives you room. When you’ve worked to raise your FTP or sharpen your strength, even if you never ride at that upper limit on race day, every watt you’ve earned changes the way the world feels beneath your wheels. Suddenly the long drags roll under you with less resentment.

Hills you once negotiated become hills you manage. Even as fatigue creeps in, even as you settle into a lower intensity for the sake of the marathon waiting for you later, you’re still moving faster for the same perceived effort because your ceiling is higher. That’s not magic and it’s not ego—it’s physiology. A stronger engine makes sub-threshold work more economical. A bigger aerobic base means less strain at race pace. And for a while, this is enough to seduce an athlete into thinking more power must always mean better performance. It feels clean, measurable, controllable. You want to believe it because those numbers glow back at you in neat columns, offering an illusion of certainty in a sport built on chaos.

But the longer you stay in endurance sport, the more you realise that FTP might tell you how brightly you can burn for an hour, yet it says nothing about what’s left of you six hours in when the world begins to tilt. There are truths you only learn by being out there for long enough that your doubts start speaking in full sentences. The truth that increased power doesn’t stop your stomach rebelling if you’ve under-fuelled. That it won’t save you when your pacing drifts into ego territory. That it cannot correct a slow bleed of dehydration or decades of poor running mechanics. You learn the hard way that Ironman performance isn’t governed by peak numbers but by the slow, steady unraveling that begins once the body has spent too long in the sunshine and the mind has spent too long negotiating its own discomfort. And in that unraveling, the athletes with the highest FTPs aren’t always the ones still standing tall.

Modern research backs what experience has always known: endurance sport isn’t an exam you pass by hitting a single threshold. It’s shaped by durability—your ability to resist physiological decay over time. Athletes with the same FTP can look completely different four or five hours into a ride. One begins to leak power, posture collapsing, heart rate drifting skyward as the cost of each watt rises. The other maintains composure, their heart rate steady, their biomechanics intact, their perceived effort stubbornly stable. That second athlete might not win a lab test, but they win races because they haven’t wasted energy with surges, haven’t cooked their gut with poor fueling, haven’t dripped watts from tension they didn’t need to carry. Their performance is not built on how high they can climb the power ladder, but how slowly they slide down it.

Power you build in the gym and on the bike is a foundation, not a prophecy so know how to use it without worshipping it. Your strength gives you efficiency; it makes your race pace feel like something you can own rather than survive. But you also need the skills that FTP can never measure. To fuel before you’re hungry because you will be humbled by what happens when you don’t. Pace with discipline, not bravado, because of what it costs to borrow too much energy from your marathon. The ability to stay in aero and have movement economy— to stay tall, loose, and mechanically sound when others fold—isn’t softness; it’s science. It’s the product of strength training, mobility, and a kind of quiet respect for your own limits.

You outperform your FTP not because the number is wrong, but because it’s incomplete. Because on race day, you are not operating in the fresh, controlled conditions of a threshold test. You are operating in the real world: heat, wind, hunger, anxiety, fatigue, unpredictability. And in that world, your success is shaped by the interplay of physiology and psychology—your ability to hold form when your legs want to wander, to maintain output when the cost of movement rises, to metabolise the hours without panicking when the race refuses to offer comfort from a smile. FTP cannot quantify your resilience, your metabolic flexibility, your gut tolerance, your pacing intelligence, your strength under fatigue, or the stubborn part of your mind that refuses to negotiate when the marathon begins to bite.

This is the real secret: power gives you options, but durability delivers outcomes. Strength builds the engine, but discipline decides how much of that engine you get to use. FTP is a measure of potential, but your performance is shaped by execution. And the reason you race faster than your FTP would ever suggest is because you have built yourself into an athlete whose limits are not defined by a number, but by your capacity to endure the long, messy, human reality of an Ironman day. You have become someone who doesn’t fall apart in the places where others crumble, someone whose strength is measured not in maximum watts but in the elegance with which you hold yourself together when everything around you starts to come undone.

You’ve earned the right to trust that. And that trust is worth far more than any threshold test will ever show.