aaronmcd

I agree with tmonk depends on the race. And category. But even 150 ctl isn't gonna get my threshold high enough to break away or give my legs the snap they need after 3 hours of racing. Its a start, but its not sufficient. I think the biggest benefit of a high ctl is that one can then work up to 3 hours of constant attacking, or maybe spend a few months sharpening the knife while dropping ctl.

But still, racing (especially crit racing) is literally a competition on who has the best genes. And threshold power is by FAR the most important skill in crits, and huge ctl can't change what you got genetically. Which is why I've preferred windy flat road races in the past ... They don't depend as much on huge threshold. But they DO depend on huge ctl + endless intervals. And this years 80-88 ctl just doesn't cut it.

aaronmcd

yeah ctl is literally TSS per day. So 20 CTL literally means ~12 minutes of hard riding per day. 50 ctl means ~30 minutes of hard riding per day. (Assuming "hard riding" is around threshold effort)

So seeing the 19 CTL in April I'm of course wondering if you are new to bike riding? If so my guess is that getting up to 50 CTL after a few months isn't bad at all, but if you keep riding you will realize its not hard "physically" to ride a lot more. It doesn't hurt the shins and knees like running. I personally found riding more miles was physically easy and even fun (exploring farther and farther) but finding time or getting good training miles was the harder part.

mike868y

well yeah I also agree with that

hubcyclist

wow, I'm really popular at the moment lol glad it produced some discussion. I'm definitely in the camp of ctl not equaling race fitness, or moreso, it depends. Of course, with the training I've been doing I'm marginally race fit, and have rediscovered that road racing doesn't really fit into my life at the moment, so I had kind of set aside all the build stuff and any road race specific training I had been doing and just setting my calendar for the fondo in July, gravel event in August, and CX season. I'd love to do training crits as time permits, but otherwise I have no real focus on road/crit stuff at the moment

ancker

Current CTL is 58, looking to get to 70 in about four weeks before a 6/12-hour race I'm doing. I won't be competing for the overall, just hoping to do 150+ miles and feel strong the whole way.
As this is my only 'real' event this year, I've let my coaching subscription expire for the time being. I started one of the Sufferfest high-volume training plans slightly adjusted for my schedule.
I'm also adding in some base/Z2 work almost every week day. I feel like it's really helping with my endurance over longer rides. (duh)

Probably not the best decision to stop being coached while riding the best I have ever, but at $60/mo with no planned races, it doesn't make sense at the moment.

mike868y

sorry, wasn't meant to be a personal attack. i just see a lot of people acting like ctl is the end goal whereas in reality it's just the foundation to the pyramid.

furiousferret

Bear in mind, all training software tracks CTL a little bit differently. As an experiment, I'm using WKO4, Golden Cheetah, Cycling Analytics, and Stravastix none are the same in terms of CTL with a difference up to 15. GC and Strava (baseline) are on the low end, while WKO is on the high end. I don't think that matters in terms of training, but one persons 90 CTL is another person's 75.

Good luck on those, it was merely a suggestion. Sorry I pulled you into an online knife fight, trust me that wasn't my intention!

mattm

Beat me to it. Steady-state guy will probably lose every time, unless it's a TT.

arai_speed

Not new to bike riding, but new PM on the new bike, prior to that it was all HR. To your last point, "finding time" is indeed the hard part.

arai_speed

I noticed that too as I use GC and Stravastix, the latter gives me a CTL of 58, which I assume accounts for those MTB rides where it calculates HRSS?

wktmeow

Just up to Carlsbad and back, then Mission Beach. Threw a nerf football around for a bit, went in the water, and laid around a bit.

furiousferret

Its early, but June has been a transcendent month for me. Last week at worlds I was fast enough up the hill for people to notice, and around here worlds is a religion. Locals care more about fast riders in worlds than ones that win actual races. The last 2 weeks I've had the best w/kg numbers from 1 minute to 40 minutes. I'm by no means the fastest, but going from a guy that was often dead last in many group rides and races to being at least a factor feels pretty good. The sad thing was I trained harder back then.

Part of it is losing weight, but another big part is fixing several bio-mechanical flaws which really held me back. I don't think that's going to be fully optimized until 2019 (so long as I don't crash again) since some muscles have atrophied, but its definitely helping right now.


The RED line is All Time, and the GREEN is June 2018. TAN is 2018

I don't think it has to do with HR (since I rarely use it and have the same issue), probably how they assign values to certain zones. Hopefully I get bored enough one day to actually look into it.

burnthesheep

Did intervals today quick at lunch at my 20min ftp number. I got that number a few months back at the end of a plan. I'm well rested and the the HR seems much lower now, as well as how slowly the HR was ramping at that power.

However, I feel the lactate tolerance could be better there. I'm going to have to do some workouts to address that. It seems in between plans, the engine has grown faster in some spots than others.

jsk

GC's version of Normalized Power uses a slightly different calculation than Training Peaks/WKO, so this is going to affect TSS of individual workouts as well as overall CTL/ATL. Generally those numbers will all be slightly higher in Training Peaks/WKO than in GC. For rides with more varied/intense efforts, the difference will be greater than in rides that are more steady state. I prefer the higher WKO numbers, because I think they better reflect the training stress of high-intensity efforts. I still feel the whole TSS/PMC concept is too heavily weighted to volume rather than intensity, but at least the balance is a little better with WKO's numbers as opposed to GC.

I do think there's more to race fitness than just CTL, but I also think it's a useful metric. I got up into the 90's during last base and early build over the winter, on about 10hrs/week although some of my base weeks were more like 14. After being off the bike for 12 days during vacation in April, my CTL took a big hit. I got it back up to 70-72 range when I resumed training, but it pretty much plateaued due to more racing and less total training volume (despite doing plenty of intensity). I feel my fitness is still decent at 70 but definitely not as good as it was before the vacation break, and it's not just endurance/FTP type efforts that are down a bit, VO2Max power is also not quite as good despite being focused on that in training the last month or so.

ancker

Do you mind elaborating a bit? In the never-ending search for excuses, I feel there's gotta be something I'm doing that makes me not as efficient as others on the bike.

furiousferret

Thanks for the explanation @jsk.

burnthesheep

I'm still new to this whole game. Just a year of focused training. Yet, I couldn't agree more.

I'm crunched for time, so I do a lot of really really tough shorter workouts. I guarantee if I ran my buddies numbers into a website, their TSS's would all be chronically 150 points higher than mine. But, maybe 1 of them out of the 10 could ever race in road racing or TT or finish what I would consider a more "extreme" fondo. These are folks in the A-ride that take on about 150mi a week in the summer.

Let's not get ahead of myself either, there's plenty of guys out there also doing the same intensity I do but also doing the really high hour weeks.

I just notice there appears to be a tangible flaw in the methodology if I can routinely drop guys who ride easily 2x the hours per week. Even on longer rides. Humble brag, whatever. No. If the TSS is like that, they should be crushing it.

furiousferret

Its long and boring, but here goes. When I first started training in 2013, something was always off. I would get injured nonstop around the hip and my Left leg power was significantly worst than my right. We would treat the injuries but they would come back. I knew it had to do with my Sacroiliac Joint (the tailbone connecting to the hip bone) but couldn't get a diagnosis between the PT's and Doctors. They all had different theories or didn't think it was a real issue. $5,000 in fees easy with no real fix.

Ultimately, I found (on my own) that I had a hyper mobile SI joint, which meant my sit bone on the left side would slide forward, and cause some muscles to work too hard (and tear), and others to just shut down. This affects 25 muscles, which is why treating the symptoms never helped and it took so long to figure out. An example being my Hamstring which was overworked (and tore twice) doing the work of the gluteals muscles. My Gluteus Max and Medius just didn't work at all. Riding with power I just didn't have the pop of someone who uses their glutes and hamstrings. It also pushes the femur forward, causing a pinching and even more issues (see below).


Hamstring dominance is also a very common thing, especially among people who sit a lot.


In January of this year I started wearing a Trochanter Belt which locked in my Sacroiliac Joint so my sit bone was static. Other aches and pains started going away, but I still had bad habits. Because of the belt, I was easily able to diagnose issues and fix them (since they actually went away). My body would still drop the hip when I walked, I would cycle with my hamstring, etc. I've been training it, but I still forget after an hour on the bike or if I haven't been doing daily exercises. I also still have a snapping hip (psoas over femur) which is going to take a while to fix (if I can, may be a labrum tear).

TLDR: Make sure you're properly driving with your glute muscles. I'm far from the only one that cycles with their hamstrings, but its easy to diagnose. Look up 'hamstring dominance', 'glute amnesia', or 'dead butt syndrome'.

I've been toying around with the idea of doing a YouTube series about this, it'll be boring content but hopefully I can help a few people.

ancker

Very interesting! A YouTube series would be cool.

I feel like I have the opposite problem.
I've never once got off the bike and thought "Man, my hamstrings/glutes are tired." It's always the quads.
Am I using them and not noticing them, or am I pedaling all wrong and missing out on a lot of power production?

mattm

That's not how it works.

It depends on so many factors, but are these big-TSS guys ever resting? If they're always tired, it doesn't matter how much they're riding.

Rest is when you get stronger, after all.*

* Rest after consistent workouts, that is

Hermes

2 hours with two times up Mount Soledad at threshold with a warmup climb up Nautilus. Woohoo.

Ttoc6

Race ride tonight. Put in a big dig early then tried my hardest not to pop. Luckily lots of people so pretty easy to surf wheels. Was able to recover enough to put in another sustained dig up the last hill and bring a lot of ground back on the leaders.




Unfortunately as we're going into the last mile, someone jumped, I followed and yelled down a kid about to cut my wheel off. As he stood the bike up I think the guy next to him brushed bars and went down. Somehow in this tight pack going 30mph only one guys ended up hitting the deck with no injuries or damage besides road rash.

People acting sketchy (attacking close to the yellow line and just not doing a good job paying attention) during the fast sections of the ride was getting to me a bit, but live and let live. No one got hurt and they got a talking to afterwards. At the regrouping point, the B group rolled up behind us and this 60+yr old guy was just beligerent. Yerlling at other people in the B group about how it "was the worst example of bike riding he has seen in his 50 years on a bike." I left right about then and message a friend when I got home. Apparently he tried to fight some young kid about riding in traffic or something? IDK.. maybe this group ride is getting too big for me...

revchuck 

I'll use myself to illustrate one of the factors Matt's referring to. I've got a relatively high CTL (low 90s), at least relative to my area. I can hang in a paceline up to the mid-20s for a good while as long as it's pretty steady. But hit a series of corners where the head of the line jumps hard coming out of it and I'm off the back pretty soon. That's because my training is focused on long distance and climbing, so it's threshold and below most of the time. Someone with less CTL but more time at VO2 max and above will crush me like an empty beer can in a redneck bar. OTOH, once the rides get >50 miles or so, I end up taking more than my share of pulls. Where you put the effort that goes into that CTL matters a lot.

furiousferret

Dry heaves and puking on the last lap. It was over 100 and I hardly drank any water during the day. That stuff may fly when its 70 out, but not 100.

I knew I shouldn't have talked myself up today, if I've learned anything from Hollywood, bad things happen when people feel good about themselves.

arai_speed

Hit the Tuesday World's ride. On lap 7 I took a major pull to close a gap (on the uphill side of the course) and could not recover in time...went out the back like a hot potato...no good deed goes unpunished.