PMC Management After A Break

[Watoni]

I had been faithfully inputting all my rides and using the powertap for 95%+ of the rides.

I have now had a few weeks of low activity and riding a bike that is not compatible with the PT and have been skiing and running as well.

How do you reflect something like this in the PMC? It would show that my fitness has taken a huge dip, but my times up local climbs are about the same and my endurance seems not to have dipped too much.

The main reason I am asking is that I have an event I would like to try to do well that a month away.

Any ideas would be most appreciated!

 

[lanierb]

Hey Watoni, All you really need is an estimated starting point CTL. You have two options basically. (1) leave the time off at zeros (the default) or (2) try to plug in some guesstimates at TSS for the other workouts you did over that time.

You're probably still in good shape but just can't handle as much volume as you could before. You only really need the starting CTL to be approximately right to give you an idea how hard you can push in the next few weeks without killing yourself.

 

[smaryka]

Anything that I consider a "workout" (running, riding a bike that doesn't have a powermeter, XC skiing -- anything where my HR gets above ~55% of max), I estimate a TSS for it and create a manual entry for it in WKO. If I hadn't done this, my entire cyclocross season would have been invisible! When in reality it gave me tons of threshold work.

As an aside, since I use a HR monitor for most exercise even if I don't have a powertap on all my bikes, I'm able to make a good estimate of TSS from the Training Load plugin for the Sport Tracks GPS-based software (which I use concurrently with WKO to log my training). Handy.

 

[frenchyge]

(1) leave the time off at zeros (the default) or (2) try to plug in some guesstimates at TSS for the other workouts you did over that time.

Yep. Since my PMC is strictly focused on cycling performance, I use method #2 for cycling workouts sans powermeter, and method #1 for any other activity.