Yep, thats the one.

I'll give you a pass on this tumble.. crashes on the velodrome are really hard to avoid!

good work - keep after it.

built out a section of the garage at the new place, organized the parts/trainers/bikes, charged up various electronic thing-ies, ate poorly and little today.

guess I'll just estimate my TSS for today.

LBS ride... ~45miles 125TSS .. have not ben on the road much in the past 2 weeks because of work and life.. I was cooked.

Rode up our local big hill with my wife, which she had never done before. She reports that it was easier than she expected. I paced us at about 1.4 w/kg which was mostly conversation pace except when it got really steep.

About 2 dozen weekend warriors passed us. It's funny how almost every single one would hammer past us (I could hear them coming so I knew they were not going nearly that hard before overtaking us) with a faux-sympathetic comment to my wife about how hard the hill was. Even better was overtaking a few of them later, tortoise and hare style, after they had completely blown up.

I can actually remember back to when I was one of them.

Then I got home and ate a bunch of leftover duck schnitzel and spaetzle from the Mountain Brauhaus, replacing at least 1000% of the calories from the ride. I regret nothing.

Possibly via heat shock protein pathways. Hot was almost twice a stressful.

"Leukocyte Hsp72 mRNA was increased immediately after exercise following downhill running (1.9 ± 0.9-fold) compared with flat running (1.3 ± 0.4-fold; P = 0.001) and in hot (1.9 ± 0.6-fold) compared with temperate conditions (1.1 ± 0.5-fold; P = 0.003)

Downhill running and exercise in hot environments increase leukocyte Hsp72 (HSPA1A) and Hsp90? (HSPC1) gene transcripts. - PubMed - NCBI

All of these numbers are basically made up anyway. TSS is a basic model of how the power that comes out of your legs causes physiological stress. Making up a number that matches your perception of how hard the effort feels is just a different model.

For sure the MTB effort felt harder than the TSS indicates. Similarly, I find that XC ski workouts feel harder than the HR-based training load indicates.

In both cases, for the purpose of tracking training load, I go ahead and use the TSS or HR calculation directly, without adjusting it upwards to account for how much harder the workout felt. But I also think it would be valid to adjust the numbers upwards. As long as the effort has some specificity, I think it's reasonable to say that how hard it feels is how hard it is. That's still a model, it's just a different model from using TSS religiously.

The reason I don't apply any adjustment is mostly that although I know the effort felt harder than the numbers show, I don't feel comfortable quantifying just how much harder, so it feels safer and more conservative to use the unadjusted numbers. In the back of my mind, though, I know that a lot of MTB or XC ski workouts probably leave me fitter than simple CTL would indicate.

Team Ride, bout 55 miles, 3600 ft, and 180 TSS. Rode poorly. Just out of shape from missing so many weekend rides due to work, etc. Today I was the nail....

Biggest week ever, but since about a third was commuting the numbers are misleading.

20:32:48
303mi
Load: 782
14,708 ft

Whenever I am overtaking someone on a climb, I ease up a bit before I reach them for a bit and ride at their pace, to make sure there won't be any pass backs.

Somebody with better physiology knowledge give the following a thumbs up its true, thumbs down you're full of it evaluation: If it's hot you have more blood diverted to vessels near the surface than when it's cool, so for the same oxygen delivery to muscles there's a greater volume of blood that needs to be pumped. If the above is true, then I'd say that, if you're trying to induce training responses to move more blood, then the training effect in heat is higher for the same power. If you're trying to generate different physiological changes, then the training load may not be any higher than if you did the same power at a cooler temperature. My conclusion would be that tss is an estimate and is reasonably robust to being close rather than exact, so I would never worry about it.

And how's that for holding contradicting opinions with myself.

Ended up with a decent if unstructured week. Basically, a few workouts that basically consisted of riding my cross bike around in the woods. A bunch of us rode over to the Blue Hills today and rode some pretty gnarly **** on our cross bikes. Ended up with a very solid skills workout and I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable again off-road on skinny tires. I cleared some stuff that I seriously could not believe that I was capable of riding. That's a nice confidence boost. Now I get to start a legit training block leading into cyclocross season. My coach tells me the next three weeks are going to take me to a pretty dark place. Hahaha hoo boy this should be interesting.

CX training in August has got to be brutal. The club workouts have already started. I can't wait for the cross season to start. I love officiating cross races. It's very different from road and equally challenging.

Bike shop "recovery" ride. 61km, 1hr50min, avg pwr 136, NP 169, TSS 101. This caps off my biggest week in months; and even then, it's only 9hrs. But they were quality. I'm really looking forward to next weekend's races.

Pound that schnitzel!!!!

Here they pre-baked some rats for 20min separate from exercise and found that cooking improved training effect.

"These data suggest that heat shock pretreatment and/or the ensuing HSP72 response may protect against muscle damage, and enhance increases in total protein and neonatal MHC content following exercise."

Acute heat stress prior to downhill running may enhance skeletal muscle remodeling

ah...i was wondering what you were responding to--then i signed in and saw the bold bit.

that was a bad choice on my part, done quickly. yes, there is increased adaptation from training in the heat.

i do believe in specificity of training, but i was speaking more specifically about measurement of power and computation of TSS. hrTSS and other estimates for MTB, IME, overestimate training stress due to fluctuations in terrain and coasting where HR stays elevated relative to effort. since we're generally talking about goals that include putting more power into the pedals, my opinion is that actual TSS (lower than hrTSS) remains the better measure of training load in the context of a PMC.

it all matters, just not very much.

I just liked the question. Thanks.

Went out this morning with my former pro friend and hooked up with some former team mates (1 Cat 1, 1 Cat 2, 1 lifer Cat 4 and his nephew that is strong but doesn't know how to ride. He will figure it out soon enough.) on the way out of town. We decided to ride with them and it was fine except for getting rained on coming back into town.

47 miles at a somewhat easy pace; no one pushed it too hard.

Yeah, and it's going to be pretty hot for the next few days. So there will suffering for sure, but there's a payoff. Assuming I don't do anything really stupid, I should have my best cyclocross form ever, so it'll be fun to see where that takes me. I'm glad it's fun on the officiating side, too. My wife even likes going to cross races more than anything else. The 33 can laugh all it wants!

Read as: Cross racers aren't aggro dooch canoes :)