Investigating my peak performances over time

So one of the most basic indicators of fitness is your peak performance, or the maximum speed and heart rate that you can keep for a set amount of time. Most training programs revolve around Functional Treshold Heart Rate (FTHR) or Functional Treshold Power (FTP), which are the maximum heart rate or power you can sustain for 60 minutes. So similarly I thought it’d make sense to look at a couple of indicators similar to this idea.

Because I have no power information, I am bound to look at heart rate and velocity. To do this I checked for each ride the maximum speed and heart rate I can sustain for a set of durations. For an individual ride a graph might look like the graph below. It shows that for shorter periods (like when I sprint) I can sustain higher heart rates and velocities. The longer the periods, the lower the heart rates and velocities.

To see how what heart rate and velocity I can sustain changes over time, I decided to look at my performances for 5 seconds (all out sprint), 5 minutes (a more sustained effort) and 30 minutes (which I think is close to what I would do when I pace myself). I plotted these over time and the results are shown below.

What this graph tells me is that I only bought a heart rate monitor in the beginning of 2015 (with my trusty Garmin Edge 500). I really became a lot faster as shown by the graph below. This is not really the case at the 5s sprints (admittedly I’ve never trained to sprint faster), but the speed I can sustain for 5 minutes has really increased over time.

This makes me hopeful towards the future. Apparently getting my kilometers in repays itself in being able to sustain higher speeds for longer times, which is reassuring. This way of looking at things is still very rudimental and thus I thinkt it’s time to start some modeling.