Have I been training too hard?

For the last two seasons I have been using a training system based on power. This has tended to be characterised by short but very intense sessions, due to my lack of available time. Well, the racing results have been rather poor and whilst the cause of this is unclear I decided to turn back the clock and return to a training system that appeared to deliver better results. This system was based on Heart Rate monitoring.

This winter I have, therefore, gone back to using HR to guide my training sessions. But I have kept the power measurement too and I have noticed that the sessions I am doing - whilst hitting the right HR levels - are in fact being done at relatively lower power levels. This has led me to re-evaluate what I have been doing for the previous two seasons and, therefore, yesterday I completed a FTP test based on Hunter & Coggan's method. This produced a FTP level that was significantly lower than I expected, leading me to wonder if have spent two years flogging myself near to death and never reaching my race potential.

Is there a lesson here? Probably, yes, and that perhaps measuring BOTH power and HR and understanding how they relate to each other is a far more sensible way to organise one's training.