SBR Utopia Season II - OPEN (Page 64)

Just found out that Rudy Project is stepping up their offer of free aero helmets to Kona participants this year and including a pair of sunglasses as well.  It says there is a $65 fee (drop in the bucket considering the helmet MSRPs for $310 and the sunglasses for $210), but I actually think they will only charge you that fee if you place an order and don't pick it up. 

Originally posted by marcag

Originally posted by GoFaster I've been out of the loop - but trying to catch up with reading through as many pages as possible, though I admit to skimming a lot. Had my last race of the season, a Sprint, on Sunday. I kind of figured in advance that this race was not going to be my best outing since training has been sporadic lately - especially the bike. I ended up riding better than expected, but still slower than last year, but that came after a craptastic swim that killed the day. The run turned into a survival effort near the end. Race report to follow soon. What I really learned from this day - and what I already knew - is that to be faster, I'm simply going to have to reduce my time on the bike. My swim is not great, and although I continue to work at it, I've accepted the fact that I may not see any real speed improvements over where I am today. But the bike, I think this is still an area I can get faster. Anyone got suggestions on a 9 month plan to get me ready for next season?

So here's a start. Bottom line, you need to work more :-) Here is your PMC for the last 2 years Bottom line, you have worked less this year than last The blue line is your fitness. If you look at last summer, you peaked July 25th with a CTL of 46 TSS/day. This year, you peaked May 25th at 37 TSS/day and you have gradually been dropping during summer You didn't do much biking after 2 of your races and your fitness dropped even more. Remember that whole thing about consistency ? If you look at the 3 lines at the top, they are the best 30', 1h and 2h work you've done. I picked top 8 of all time. Notice how how best efforts were when you were at your best fitness ? But even when you were at your peak, you're not working "that hard". I am currently sitting at 65 TSS/day, although that is probably more than you need to do to see some improvement. I looked at the balance of time in various zones, you do spend a good distribution. You did a good load Mid Feb to mid May but then you backed off. You do a lot of 4 rides / 4 hours per week. I would add another 15minutes to each of those, with quality work in there. Also depending on if you will do long course/short course you may want to do things a bit differently. If long course, you don't do long enough rides. This is just a quick impression to stir some debate/discussion

That's really great info, Marc!  Huge thanks to Neil for giving all that info to Marc and for Marc taking the time to put it all into the PMC and analyze it.

I only wish I had more data than what I do so I could do something similar.  At what point in the data gathering process do you think the PMC becomes of value?  Obviously, the four rides I've done so far with the PM are not going to tell me anything (PMC-wise) -- I imagine it starts to become somewhat useful after a month or two, but becomes much more useful when you're able to use it over a full season and multiple seasons. 

bike pretty darn tough for an IM course. But not savage. Pacing was key and I am interested to see what my files look like when I get home. hard not to get caught up in IM fever and racing. May have cooked the first climb slightly. Lots of leg sapping rollers throughout. Big downhill to the draft fest, I mean flats. It was HORRIBLE out there and sorta makes me not want to do m dot again. Horribly huge draftpacks, and lots of them. I got cranky and it affected me

run, well the run. Felt good through 8 then the walks started. I mean I felt great, was holding back just warming up. Between 8 and 15 walk breaks got longer, runs shorter. Quads were hurting. IT was hurting. Stopped around 14 for a potty break (first on the run) and it was clear-or not- that I was pretty dehydrated. Strange as i took water at every station and actually stopped 3x on the bike to pee, way more than I do I training. So somewhere in there it went the other way. My BP drops when I get dehydrated and I started getting a bit dizzy so went straight to recovery mode at mile 15. Run was off he table. Every aid station got two water cups and walked to the next. When the broth came out, used that as well. I had abandoned my plan a of 11:30. And switched to finish. I did this until I stsrtedhaving to lee again and it was relatively clear and was able to start running some at mile 22. It was a long day.

having something other than my finish to race for is what got me through 15 to 22. So, yeah, that's the short version.

but all of it, the quad pain, IT band pain, went away in the last mile. Incredible crowd support, incredible finish line.

spa day today, river rafting Wednesday up in the interior, and a b&b on the coast of Vancouver island over the weekend

Originally posted by marcag  So here's a start. Bottom line, you need to work more :-) Here is your PMC for the last 2 years Bottom line, you have worked less this year than last The blue line is your fitness. If you look at last summer, you peaked July 25th with a CTL of 46 TSS/day. This year, you peaked May 25th at 37 TSS/day and you have gradually been dropping during summer You didn't do much biking after 2 of your races and your fitness dropped even more. Remember that whole thing about consistency ? If you look at the 3 lines at the top, they are the best 30', 1h and 2h work you've done. I picked top 8 of all time. Notice how how best efforts were when you were at your best fitness ? But even when you were at your peak, you're not working "that hard". I am currently sitting at 65 TSS/day, although that is probably more than you need to do to see some improvement. I looked at the balance of time in various zones, you do spend a good distribution. You did a good load Mid Feb to mid May but then you backed off. You do a lot of 4 rides / 4 hours per week. I would add another 15minutes to each of those, with quality work in there. Also depending on if you will do long course/short course you may want to do things a bit differently. If long course, you don't do long enough rides. This is just a quick impression to stir some debate/discussion

Very nice Marc! I had a feeling this was the case when looking over the logs, but this goes into much more detail. I had a hard time seeing how the weekly bike TSS would be reaching or going that far over 300 or so. With many weeks reaching maybe 4 hrs or so, that means one needs to average 75 per ride (with 4 rides/wk), or an IF near 0.87 for rides of an hour. It's possible, but it takes some concentrated effort to do. Picking up near a couple hundred more TSS/wk for awhile should give some nice gains on the bike. More is entirely possible, but will have an effect on how much s/r one can do. Last week was a rather solid one for me with ~660, and it would be quite hard to keep up a good deal of swimming & running to go along with that for long. Possible, but a lot of things have to go right in spacing out the workouts and recovery.

Congratulations Chris!

I have a swim planned at lunch - the first since my tri at the end of June!!  I hope I remember how to get there.

I started entering my workouts at TP awhile back but with uploading to Garmin, BT & Strava I was getting a little annoyed .

yeah, I haven't used TP in a few months as the BT logs have mostly been enough. Didn't really want to have a monthly payment for the advanced TP features. Also load everything into Garmin as it's easy to pull a map from a previous ride there and they give some more info that BT doesn't do quite as well. Strava is just for the bigger rides and races to get a bigger idea of what's going on. The KOM and ability to see the grades is very nice, but regarding anything else, still seems like they don't know what to do with themselves. Has anyone else figured out how they get the Weighted Power? It seems similar to the idea of Normalized, but doesn't come out the same as Garmin or TP did. These other two always matched for me in both AP & NP. AP is usually there with Strava, but Weighted has been off.

It's pretty easy to see above when I was riding 3x a week and when I was riding 6-7x a week focusing on bike racing.  My CTL never really gets below 40, and it peaked at 112 just before my most important cycling races in late summer 2012. 

You'll notice that the last couple of months for me is pretty flat.  Simply because I'm putting more focus on running and swimming for my IM prep.  Still putting in the bike volume, but not really trying to add on to it.  I could certainly try to ride closer to 4x and 225+ mpw, but I'm simply playing my strength on the bike to focus on the other areas.  I would like to think that my bike fitness is improving...but clearly it is not.  And I'm not really surprised.

LOL...it's funny, but the truth.  I do feel like I'm neglecting my bike a little.  That said, the past 10 weeks or so my weekly TSS has been between 400-500.  So while I may not be seeing improvements, I think I'm at least doing enough to maintain a reasonable amount of bike fitness.  Which is pretty much my goal for this IM.

For you, I think 4 rides, with 3 x 1 hour at a TSS of around 80-85 (hard ride) and a long ride of 2.5-3 hours and 125-150 TSS would give you right around 400 for a week.  And a CTL of roughly around 55.  That should be a pretty good start for you to building on what you've already got while maintaining your swim and run.

The beauty of the PCM is that it doesn't care about what work came from short rides or what came from long rides.  It's just cumulative work.  It can point out weaknesses if you are focusing too much on long rides, and not getting in enough TSS during the week.  Or if you missed rides...you'll see that line dip pretty hard.

So, all the data junky talk has had me over at TP noodling around with what I can see on the free site.  One interesting thing came up.  I recorded my ride at Tman on both my 910xt (was on my wrist and in automode anyway) and my 800 (as my 910 has been balky and I wanted to see HR and power in BIG numbers), and I just happened to look at both rides in TP (only uploaded one to Strava, lest someone call me out on my weekly hours - yep, many of my peeps are great like that).

Intersting thing is how different the TSS scores are.  For the non-power (I haven't paired the 910 with the Quarg as yet), it was a hrTSS of 358.7.  With the PM, it was a TSS of 120.9. 

I looked at my zone settings, and they are fairly close to what I think is right (just adjusted the HR zones, and only a little, but the hrTSS number didn't change).  The power zones were a bit high, as it had a number for my threshold of ~325 (just changed to 270, which might not be spot on, but is close).  The TSS also did not change after I adjusted that number.

Kinda scratching my head, but wondering if HR is just that far off.  It says that hrTSS is best for a long, continuous effort - and my bike leg was pretty much that.

Thoughts?

Matt

Off the top of my head, if you change a threshold or zone value after a workout is in, I think it only applies it to new workouts entered going forward. Anything already in there would have to be done in the workout. Or something to that effect. I forget the specifics of doing this in TP, but do you get the basic idea of what I'm saying?

Also, per the HR, how spiky was the recording? At times I've had a lot of junky spikes in there of 200+ which would have the potential to wreak havoc with that function.