@Samus , I‘d a somewhat similar pattern this fall – at the end of first year of cycling (but with a previous life in semi-pro sports a significant while ago)
To me the load of a long weekend ride (shorter than yours, but still) is also different from a set of short 70–100 TSS Interval sessions. The former is more a general-body fatigue whereas the latter is directly going into “aching” legs/etc. But, for me it worked well to use the fitness graph for mid- and long-term analysis and guidance, including tapering for 300 km races or such – and to simply listen to my legs and body for fatigue and necessary rest on a daily basis.
You see that the only way for me to get into the “green” training zone is to do long rides – around Fitness ~= 100. Recently I have only be doing 1–2 h rides or training, with ~10 h per week: there is no way for me to get into the “green” zone that way. I can not train harder (per time) and more (time) and thus that’s what it is. Grey zone seems to be the best training zone for me with a pretty-full-time job and family. Fine for me.
And I’ll throw in some long/endurance rides in the holiday season again, which will push fitness up – and, @Lukasz_Pludowski , I am pretty certain that this is not going to be a (injury) risk due to the style of riding: even 6–8 h at NP < 2/3 FTP is truly easy if ones takes it easy, eats and drinks sufficiently during the ride.
For me, it does require a day off the bike afterward and I often go for a short run;-)
Now, maybe I am too lame to push myself into green with intervals, my body feeling says it’s not where it, the body/legs, wants to “be” – that’s too high a(n injury) risk for me to try.
Amazing! I also have a previous life of being in a totally different sport. I picked up cycling because I am literally too beat up to do anything else, haha. Four surgeries over my career.
The fatigue feels totally different to me as well. The high intensity intervals feels closer to the fatigue I get from lifting. The muscles feel depleted of their ability to perform at their best. The endurance ride fatigue feels more like the energy reserves have been burned up.
Yeah, this is what I’m doing at the moment. I also throw Olympic lifting into the mix so there’s a lot of listening going on during any given week. While intervals.icu adds lifting to fatigue, it doesn’t factor into training load. You have to figure out your own way of working it in.
My power profile seems to be the rare “sharp V” pattern. It’s an odd marriage of anaerobic base with long distance specialty.
I’m sure there could be some weird data collection bias at play as well. Hard to conclude much. However, this profile does match my observations. It’s clear where my advantage is relative to my age group. The longer the ride, the more the advantage. Unless it’s < 1min.
You may also be looking at the Performance Management Chart with CTL, ATL, TSB, etc. I think this is well explained in this TrainingPeaks article so have a read and then let me know if there is anything you don’t understand. It is worth keeping an eye on performance management metrics, but bearing in mind it will go mad when you do long events and may even get quite odd if you go touring. In my experience it is a bit skewed to weight the loading of longer durations more than higher intensity. In that respect, be careful not to be led into doing too much intensity.
Sounds a bit like what you experienced.
Not much else to be found in a quick search. Interesting topic.
I see a clear progression on your chart, you went from 80 to around 110. And your fitness and form are all ok. Looking at your graph i agree that your body is prepared for a 6-8h ride. 300 TSS ride is not that taxing if your daily average is 110, it’s only 3:1 ratio I wouldn’t compare it to 900 TSS did twice in a row from a 50 fitness level, it’s 18:1 ratio, it would be for you 1980 TSS twice in a row. And i hope you agree that 2k TSS ride would be really taxing for your body.
I know that you can bump up your graph with long endurance rides, been there, did that. All i’m trying to say is, with many long rides you are collecting fatigue and the graph is showing exactly that. When you do a short intensive FTP interval work, muscles/hearth are your limit preventing from overtraining, you just get tired quickly and it is hard to collect much fatigue that way. With tempo rides things are getting more complicated. They are just slightly harder the Z2 but in a long run can be leading to overtraining, and i look at endurance rides just as longer and slower tempo brothers with fatigue building very slowly over time, and graph shows exactly that and prevents from overtraining which for me is easiest with continous long endurance rides and not hard intervals.
I’m glad you are happy and congratz on your results
I know some ultras and they do structured training, so i can be biased.
Thanks for the link! The quoted section seems to be exactly what I’m experiencing.
My approach seems very similar to this coach’s. I do two short threshold/VO2 sessions during the week and long, slow rides on the weekend. (The weekend rides are relatively short right now as I suss out my winter gear, but will be ramped back up progressively once I can get outside.)
The fat adaptation he mentions is another critical component. You get to a point where it is impossible to eat enough calories relative to the effort. I’m not sure how one measures training of fat adaptation other than subjective experience while riding. This summer I had some unplanned circumstances where I was able to test the extent to which I could ride without adequate nutrition. But it’s not something I’d repeat by choice.
lots to unpack here. From your initial post as well as from the discussion so far.
Yes indeed, not all TSS is created equal.
And CTL (Chronic Training Load) or the “Form” curve in Intervals.icu is just a mathematical means.
Is it a good tool? Depends. What does it measure? The external load which is put into your pedals as a proxy for the stress you put on your body. Which, while catered for intensity and duration as well as decay (42 and 7 day exponentially weighted moving average) ist not equal to / doesn’t have to be the right representation of the strain your body is underlying. Maybe as a slow twitcher, riding at 120 % FTP does fatigue you way more than it would a fast twitcher or vice versa. So same stress, different strain.
To complicate it further: stress does say nothing about the adaption which occurs. So this begs the question: why calculate or use TSS and then CTL and ATL at all?
Well - you have to answer this. Maybe, with at least two or three years training experience under one’s belt, one could make some assumptions on what “ramp rate” one could use as a maximum before breaking down or what CTL number could be sustainable. But… only if life stresses you equally in all those years and situations for one. And maybe only if your training composition is comparable in those years. It might become thrown off, if you in one year only try to do HIIT. Well, that would be the “not all TSS is created equal” part, then.
But would it? For all its practicability, the concept of TSS is quite, well practicable. As in: yes, with the normalized Power going in, the part of high intensity or better - of relative intensity is taken care of. Again - not all individuals are created equal in what they can produce relative to their VO2max and how hart it is for them to ride at 90 % or 100 % or 115 % etc. But here’s the thing: even if you would conceptualize a LIT-CTL and a HIT-CTL to have them drawn on two separate Y-axis’ this wouldn’t remedy that problem to clearly depict the strain your body is experiencing there (and no - I don’t think using TRIMP - Training Impulse and Heart rate would solve this. Although the HR is a valuable and not to be neglected data).
And as a second point: yes, these long base rides - as easy as they sometimes might seem - put a lot of strain on the body. That’s why they are so effective.
I personally go more or less totally by feel. I know when I’d rather would want to train a bit more but are held back by life’s realities and I also know when I rather go a bit slower because a bit of rest would be sound. Yes - I also keep an eye on the CTL curve but rather as one of many data points and I never aim for any number, be it CTL, ATL and least of all “Form”.
And yes, after a week or even two of bikepacking or even a bikepacking race the ATL is astronomical and the CTL follows. With Form deep in red and High Risk. But - that is a very true representation of yourself even if it is neglecting your sleep deprivation, the strain on your muscles, tendons and ligaments, bum and everything. So it actually paints a picture which is still way too good. And of course every metric tanks thereafter. Because normally you should rest but even if you doesn’t you would need enormous amounts of load to point the CTL upwards again. Mathematic algorithm and life reality work in tandem here.
Coming back to the PMC chart and the “form” curve. As I said - it behaves like it should and is expected. But you could try and go into the settings of intervals.icu and pretty much the first line where you can edit things has at the far right the field “form”. There you can switch between “absolute value” and “percentage of fitness” to see, which you like for your form curve a bit more. doesn’t change the underlying principle that much or at all, though.
Hope this helps a bit. If not - I’m happy to indulge into all things ultra endurance training.
Out of interest, what type of events interest you most, there? Any events planned for next year already?
I have 1-2 winter ultras (B and A events) around the corner, depending on some factors (eg, whether I can get my gear leveled up in time, borders being open in COVID era, etc). The goal is to hit two ITI qualifiers before next winter. We’ll see if I can pull everything together in time.
I made the Unbound XL lottery. That’ll be my A event for the summer. Also contemplating Gravel Worlds–we’ll see. I’d like to do some longer bikepacking races but gotta figure out when to squeeze them into my schedule.
Third - the shape of the graph is what it is because of the nature of your training and racing profile. We’d all show the same shape of chart for the same efforts as you. Likewise, yours would replicate others was your training plan to change to theirs.
In my head, I remind myself this whole site is the tool, not just the one chart. If your PMC is the expected pattern for your training/racing, it’s job part-done.
Time to look at an output graph or two to see if other dials are moving too. I’m assuming FTP and HRLT and thereby training zones are updated every couple of months, thus making stress scores / PMC a relative thing one to another across the seasons and years. However, eg
is absolute FTP/kg going up?
is there a positive change in the shape of the power or HR duration curves?
how is your training impacting pace?
etc etc etc
If the performance measures are going in the right direction, and the shapes on your PMC chart are as expected given the nature of your specific training/racing (with a stepped movement up-shift left to right… and possible narrowing of variation??? I don’t know) then all’s good in your world. It’s the shape you’d expect to see.
Sorry if I get this horribly wrong.
I come back to repeating my appreciation of the efforts you do do. Top stuff.
For what it’s worth, my stats looked all barmy due to a 1000mile endurance ride not so long back. I’m looking at my VO2max and FTP/kg presently falling away because I’m not putting in the same efforts I did in training or on that event. Those are the metrics I’m focusing on just now as I begin again to rebuild load after 3-months off. My PMC is beginning to look more as I imagine others will, but not yours. We’re all here for the same reason but with unique circumstances and requirements. Good luck with yours.
Tx for publishing that writeup, I hadn’t seen it before!
This data is only available at Intervals.icu and your account there.
I have taken some steps to address this.
You can configure Intervals.icu to push all incoming files (from Garmin et al, not Strava - against their TOS) to Dropbox
You can download all the wellness and fitness info in a CSV anytime
You can download all the workouts in a folder in a zip of MRC, ERG or ZWO or JSON files
Developers can use the Intervals.icu API to extract data
I still need to add support for downloading (or pushing to Dropbox) a fit file of an activity post power edits and so on.
With regards to the lifetime of Intervals.icu itself it is true that I cannot guarantee anything (like any online service). However it is making some money and I have done a white-label deal with a coaching company so its not likely to go-away anytime soon!
oh, if I’m not mistaken you did indeed. It’s already a bit in the past. Maybe I should update the blog some time a bit. But then - tools evolve and it’s no news that the reader is invited to just check for himself what the current status is and if the tool is interesting for him or her. All I can do and want is to wet the appetite…
And Unbound XL - congrats. Yeah, I guess this would interest me sometime also. But going overseas for such a “short” race (lol - everything is relative, I guess) is no thing I’d undertake lightheartedly. Maybe I would incorporate it into a longer visit of the states… once we hopefully can plan such journeys with more confidence again.
Yeah. I found out about it recently and it has infected my mind… to the point that I’m mostly looking past Unbound XL towards ITI 350. Remains to be seen if I take to winter ultras–fat bike still hasn’t arrived yet! But I’m collecting the gear for it. On paper it seems like a good fit. We’ll see!
Yeah, it does seem that there’s an added challenge in that you have to do sleep dep in order to finish by the cut-off whereas in most bikepacking races you can set your own pace. We’ll see how it goes. I’m always little hesitant (almost superstitious, even) about guessing at my performance in these events.
I like Amanda Nauman’s take: “My first goal is to finish. My second goal is to win.” The first is not a given in the slightest!
This is pretty much what Xert does and I think it works well.
Each ride is analysed and work is allocated to Peak, High and Low energy systems, which are then tracked in a similar way to the CTL, ATL and Form. Peak and High are added together and tracked with a shorter window of 22 days. Low is tracked with a window of 60 days.
Xert will only advise you do high intensity workouts when your Peak + High Form is above zero but will continue to advise endurance workouts if your Low form is above -30% of your total Training Load.
Xert also balances the amount of Peak, High and Low strain in your system at any given time by suggesting workouts that create that balance.
Unfortunately the current TSS system has no way of separating those out.
Thats interesting. Do they adjust for age at all? I have found as I have gotten older (50 now) I can handle much less high intensity stuff and have tried to compensate by adding volume.
I don’t think they (Xert) compensate for age (I’m 74 so would probably notice), but they extract your “signature” from all your rides rather than doing specific tests so presumably it will have an effect. Also it’s very easy on any day to swap in an endurance ride if you need to. There is no pre-built plan, each day they suggest a workout based on your current load and your stated goals.
As @John_Dalton said, they don’t make any direct compensation for age but you can change the constants for High + Peak and Low independently for both Chronic and Acute trading load to better reflect your own recovery rates.
If I were to guess, PMC was geared towards certain disciplines where the higher and lower intensity stuff can be grouped together. But it may be that the equivalency between them isn’t a linear relationship, particularly when you get into very long distances. Doing a tour averaging 80 miles a day doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly ready for 500 TSS weeks of high intensity.
The problem with combining them is that if you’re doing a very polarized training plan, the low intensity TSS makes it harder to track high intensity TSS. Additionally, high endurance volume is more volatile–fitting a 10 hour ride into one’s schedule isn’t easy and you often have to take what you can get.
But, for me it worked well to use the fitness graph for mid- and long-term analysis and guidance, including tapering for 300 km races or such – and to simply listen to my legs and body for fatigue and necessary rest on a daily basis.
