I had finally managed to get my training into a regular routine after the holidays and had completed ~3wks of pretty steady SST at 500+ TSS/wk before I got sick again last week. CTL had been climbing slowly but steadily at a reasonable pace, so I was pretty disappointed when my congested chest and throat did not feel like training for a few days. This Wed the weather looked like it was going to improve and I wasn't feeling bad, but still suffering from some cough and phlegm, so I thought I'd get into the fresh air and try to break some stuff loose in my chest. I had an awesome ride and felt surprisingly strong! When I downloaded my file, I looked at the PMC and saw TSB at +5. During those couple days of rest to let my system fight the cough, my TSB had improved from -20 to +5 without my realizing it, but I sure felt it during the ride. Pretty cool. Anyone else been surprised by their strength during a ride and found out later that the PMC had predicted it?
Alas, I'm too much of a geek and always have a good idea of what my TSB is. Will be +10 tomorrow and I'm racing so...
I'm not racing yet, so I've been focused more on CTL than TSB. The strange thing was that I expected to feel weak from the illness, but after hacking up a lung my legs felt amazingly good. It wasn't until I got home that I noticed the TSB and thought "Hmmm... neat."
I certainly hope so............I'm relying on it to help me peak for a very important 2 day race late in April
Yes! And its really reassuring... reminds you that although the PMC looks like a whole lot of theoretical gumph, its actually right.
+1... except it was more like every peak performance for the whole of 2006 that PMC retroactively predicted... except 1 road race where i had incredible legs but had TSB of -10.. which is not super low but i had a REALLY good day.
Hmmm, I think you mentioned that before. Yes, hilly. I grew up around the area of the race, know the roads well. Bad memories of last time I did the tour. Lost traction on a fast left hander (a few corrugations I didn't remember being there before), went down and lost several feet of skin all down my left side. Nice. Anyway, it will suit your preferred style of riding I'd say.
You know, my first instinct was to think about my past month and wonder if the TSB relationship was holding (I suspected it didn't - but I was wrong). Being in race prep mode, basically I have a fair dose of intensity in the weekly cycle at the moment and CTL is pretty much just bumping around the low-mid 90s. Has been for a while. So how does TSB correlate with my diary notes? Not full notes but a short desciptor which generally describes how my legs felt from a selection of rides over past 4 weeks (rides with some reasonable intensity only, since they are the ones you can really notice it): +11 OK + 7 Good - 3 Tough day + 8 Good +17 Good +10 Good 0 OK to good - 2 OK/good - 8 Crap - 3 OK - 8 Not good / struggled - 6 Good +14 Came good after 45 min That's a pretty good correlation and actually surprised me since I've pretty much been hovering in the neutral zone (-10 to +10) for some time and I didn't expect I would necessarily notice being so sensitive to single digit TSB. Something to put in the memory banks,especially as this season's PMC looks quite different to the last couple of times I peaked for races. BTW - I've not been looking at TSB in advance at all, so there was no preconceived notion about how I "should" feel.
Is this correlation based on the TSB after the ride or before the ride? Or does the software do something in between? (I don't have a PM or the related software, so am tracking estimated TSS, CTL, ATL and TSB via a simple excel spreadsheet. Generally, I'd been thinking that it was the TSB immediately before the ride that was relevant in terms of thinking about freshness .... but given the comments above that you are looking at TSB after entering the ride details it would appear to be TSB after the ride ?)
TSB today is calculated on yesterday's CTL & ATL (day -1), so what you do today has no effect on today's TSB score. Hence the TSB shown in CP will be the same before/after the ride. It is only updated the following day.
Thanks .... I've also been using my simple spreadsheet tool to input a few days sessions in advance to see how the week will look: mostly it tells you what you might expect, but it can be fun to play with some different options to try to optimise the week, (given that due to work and family commitments, my weeks can be somewhat variable)
Quite often. That's kind of why it's there - to predict and plan these things. So the unplanned stuff would come out of that too, one would think. I did see a -40 TSB at one point last year on a day when I felt spectacular and could have ripped the cranks off the bike but that was an anomoly. When I'm < -20, I'm generally lacking sharpness. On the flip side, if I'm +, I'm at my best. Even if I'm coming off sickness, I may not be fully physically capable yet but the sharpness is there.
yes for me. I haven't gathered the stats from my training logs but I suspect it works around 90% of the time for me. Possibly even more.