Unscheduled Downtime

My dwindling fitness graphically portrayed, thanks to some unscheduled downtime.

After our 10-day monster training camp in Lanzarote in early March (blog post about that still to come), I carried some pretty great form and fitness straight through til the Bedford stage race two months later. Well... to be fair, that form was starting to get somewhat ragged around the edges by then, and as a former "big event" triathlete I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. My years of training until this year have been based on the train hard, train harder, train so hard you're dead, taper/rest, then race schedule that I really had no idea how to approach this week-in week-out constant training and racing. How does one maintain fitness without too much fatigue and still have good form for races? So after Bedford I decided the best way to hang on to my form yet stay fresh was to forego the weekly long rides and stick mostly to shorter stuff, either as races or faster training rides. After all, the longest non-TT race I'll do this year will be less than three hours, so why the need for 100 mile training rides?

So with a CTL hovering nicely around 110 and TSB plus or minus a few digits, I settled in these past few weeks to that plan. And while it seemed to be working in terms of freshness and fatigue balancing into some semblance of form, I still was missing that zip in my legs that I had back in mid-April. I wasn't awesome when I wanted to be; form in races seemed to come and go when it felt like it. Thursday night handicap AKA training race? Great performance! Southeast road race divisional championships? Meh. Crystal Palace saw me relying more on good position and timing than on good legs, and the National 10 mile TT last weekend could barely garner FTP watts. What to do?

Then, a crash a week ago Friday (bringing with it some unwelcome road rash and bruises) made the link between my body's fatigue and freshness even more tenuous, and finally last Tuesday the saddle sore I'd been carefully nursing for the past few weeks was no longer a minor annoyance. So as a result I've been off the bike for six days with at least another two to come before I dare try my luck matching arse to saddle again.

I've been trying to find a bright side to this as I watch my CTL drop like a stone with every passing day, now below the level it was when I finished the training camp in March. And I think it's this: downtime isn't necessarily a bad thing. The timing isn't catastrophic. I'm not truly sick or injured, so building my fitness back up shouldn't be an issue. My peak from the last major build came about six weeks later, and looking at the calendar, the same timing now should mean good form for the Essex Giro national series race at the end of July. So in the end I think I've answered my question about form and fitness and how one races all summer long trying to hold a peak: you don't. At some point you just have to let it go, take a rest, then work to build it up again. I mean, I could race 12 months a year non-stop, but I suspect I'd just end up frustrated that I never felt 100% fresh and zippy. Some downtime, unscheduled or not, is required.

Now I just need to figure out how to make the races that count your best ones... but I have a sneaking suspicion the answer will be much the same. This is a big reason why I love cycling: there's just so much that can't be predicted, though we data geeks sure love to try.

Peaking and Tapering, Part II

In Part I, I talked about how (I felt) my taper wasn't quite right for Ironman Lake Placid. I've done more training hours, more consistent training, more intense training and more volume this year than in any year before, so my previous tried-and-true taper method also needed some reworking (it appears). For Ironman Hawaii, I'm going to be a bit stricter on myself in adhering to scheduled workouts in the last few weeks before the race -- both in the sense that I don't overdo it and I don't underdo it -- and hopefully I can have a better race day.

Ultimately, I want to use the Performance Management Chart (PMC) to plan my workouts to help me achieve two things by race day:
1) TBS of about +20
2) CTL loss of about 10% from its highest point.

To this end, the first thing I did was plug my proposed workouts for the next three weeks into SportTracks, along with their projected TSS values. Incidentally I find SportTracks with the Training Load plugin way easier than WKO+ to work with; the calendar makes sense, the notes field lets me add stuff seamlessly, and the general UI and feel of the software is so much more intuitive. And since I'm using TSS/TRIMP values to determine my training load and stress balance (the plugin by default uses HR), the PMC will look the same in WKO+ as in SportTracks -- just nicer. :)

I got my projected TSS values by looking at past similar workouts in WKO+. For instance, I know that a long ride of ~100km/4hrs at an intensity factor of .70 will give me about 200 TSS points. Similarly, an hour-long run including some mile repeats gives me a TSS of 100 or so. Swims I generally use one TSS point per minute, less if I swim easy and more if I swim hard.

Three weeks of workouts, including the final two weeks of peaking/tapering from my Endurance Nation plan, plugged into SportTracks gives me this for my PMC:


projected CTL/ATL for October 10, 2009

That's a CTL of 119 (down roughly 10% from a projected high of 131 on Sept. 29) and an ATL of 97 to give me a TSB of 22 the day before race day. The TSB is a bit high maybe. But it's also likely that my workouts will feel a bit harder once I get to Kona as I'll need to acclimatise a bit, so having a bit extra on the TSB should be fine. Interesting to compare it to my LP taper (the big drop leading up to July 26) and see how it drops off more gradually and with fewer ATL spikes until the final week.

It's an interesting balance, tapering to shed enough fatigue without losing too much fitness. The problem is, as TSB rises, CTL decreases which can mean more than 10% fitness loss on race day. So which one is more important, keeping to a no-more-than 10% fitness loss, or having a TSB of +20? I think this is probably a problem for most athletes who carry a high CTL: the higher your TSS/day (which is what CTL is), the more you have to do to maintain it. And the more severely you taper and cut your volume, the more CTL drops compared to its absolute highest.

The highly analytical article from Coggan describing the art and science behind the PMC is here, but in my view the most important sentence is this:

in the Performance Manager concept, an individual’s CTL (and the “composition” of the training resulting in that CTL – see more below) determines their performance potential (at least within limits), but their TSB influences their ability to fully express that potential. Their actual performance at any point in time will therefore depend on both their CTL and their TSB, but determining how much emphasis to accord to each is now a matter of trial-and-error/experience, not science.

But I think it's also important to keep in mind what ChuckieV has said about tapering and freshness (though I have to say he loses me with the "anyone training less than 15 hours a week only needs a few days of taper" bit!):

Quite often athletes erroneously aim for being "fresh" when Ironman day arrives, when they really just need to focus on being rested.

Rested is what I'm going to have to be to put on my best performance. That means early to bed every night, naps if I need them, limiting the time spent on my feet doing touristy things and generally staying away from the hustle and bustle of 2000+ other Ironman athletes stressing about their race.

Peaking and Tapering, Part I

Yesterday I had an enlightening moment reading Joe Friel's blog about Projecting Race Readiness. I had known that my IMLP taper wasn't right, that I had tapered too much and lost too much fitness, resulting in a less-than-ideal race performance, but hadn't really crunched the numbers to see how. I had followed the protocol of 70% of usual volume in the first week of taper, 50% in the second week, 30% in the third week. Still, I felt flat and underpowered on race day and terrible compared to last year at Ironman Germany where I had tapered so carefully and hit race day feeling great.

Two things stood out for me in particular from Joe's post:
1. Training Stress Balance (TSB, or CTL minus ATL) should be about +20 by race day.
2. Total loss of Chronic Training Load (CTL, aka fitness) should be kept to about 10%.

I had a look at my own Performance Management Chart from WKO+ and checked out the numbers. Sure enough, between my taper start date of July 5 and race date of July 26, my CTL (blue line) had gone from 133 to 112, a 15% drop. And my TSB (yellow line) was over 30, way too high! Ironically, being more "rested" through a lower ATL (red line, aka fatigue) and higher TSB is the very thing that helped me feel slow and tired and flat during the race.

Tapering is certainly part art, part science, and there are a lot of factors that could have affected my race day readiness in Lake Placid. But from studying my data below, I can see clearly now how my drastically reduced training load -- too much too soon -- nearly blew my race though a poorly-executed peak period and taper.


How not to peak/taper

In Part II I'll take a stab at describing what my peak period and taper for Kona should look like, and what I'll do differently to achieve it (and in doing so, hopefully achieve a better race day freshness than I did at Lake Placid).

If you're not familiar with WKO+ and all the terms I've used, here's a basic crash course.