It's actually a very specific power profile. It'll be 10-20 or so minutes of work for the actual run (at 30mph it's 2 minutes a mile and you'll spend plenty of time under 30), but perhaps with an hour or more surrounding. Some amount of warm up almost for sure possibly with some substantial efforts.
The body has only a few kilojoules of oxygen debt that it can get into before the pain becomes too much and you're forced to slow down to stop the pain. It's important that you spend those kilojoules just right. So that means accelerating aerobically as long as possible, which is going to be a slow acceleration. You might not use all five miles, but I would wager a good portion of it. And using a power meter to ensure that the cyclist doesn't go anerobic before the critical portion is actually really smart (I don't know if they did this).
The goal is to be doing 50-60mph aerobically (or whatever you can actually do) and then have a 30-60 second interval start at exactly the right point to lead to maximum speed over the 200m. But because the human body isn't as precise as our measurements, you'll never get it exactly right. Some days at the end of the 200m you'll say "I still had some legs left" and other days you'll start to fall apart before the start of the timed 200m.
A highly optimized pedaling plan might even include a coasting section with a strong focus on breathing after the initial aerobic acceleration but before the final effort. If your vehicle is slick enough you might only lose 0.5 to 1 mph but if you can trade that for flushing all the CO2 out of your system, that might be worth it.
The body has only a few kilojoules of oxygen debt that it can get into before the pain becomes too much and you're forced to slow down to stop the pain. It's important that you spend those kilojoules just right. So that means accelerating aerobically as long as possible, which is going to be a slow acceleration. You might not use all five miles, but I would wager a good portion of it. And using a power meter to ensure that the cyclist doesn't go anerobic before the critical portion is actually really smart (I don't know if they did this).
The goal is to be doing 50-60mph aerobically (or whatever you can actually do) and then have a 30-60 second interval start at exactly the right point to lead to maximum speed over the 200m. But because the human body isn't as precise as our measurements, you'll never get it exactly right. Some days at the end of the 200m you'll say "I still had some legs left" and other days you'll start to fall apart before the start of the timed 200m.