Monday, June 20, 2011

Taper week!!

Woooo boy are my numbers low coming into the Tour of KC...


This is the chart I use for training and tapering.  You can see all those red dots lined up on the bottom...those are when I decided to take some time off of biking.  Not the best of timing.  Oh well.  That's why I'm a cat 5 I suppose.

So each red dot is a value assigned to the days effort (Training stress score/TSS).  The pink line is the ATL (Acute Training Load).  That's the short-term (7 days I think) training load on my system.  The blue line is my CTL/Chronic Training Load.  That is my fitness.  So you can see as I have more TSS points, my CTL and ATL go up.  That's good.  But the yellow line is TSB or Training Stress Balance.  Run the yellow line too far down and you're more likely to get injured/sick/etc.  I need to have the yellow line above 0 by the beginning of ToKC.  Otherwise I'll get dropped all 3 days because my legs will just be too tired.  The more you train, the less that TSS effects your TSB.  So you can train harder and more often, and not get as tired.  That's why my TSB drops so much with a decent training session.  You can fix that by riding more consistently.  Consistency is everything in life it seems.  Whether racing a bike, playing an instrument, or swinging a golf club, repetition of good actions builds success.  Seems elementary, but the application is everything.

This week is pretty light.  Today is stay off your feet day.  Tuesday is 4-90 sec efforts with 5 minutes of rest between efforts.  Wed. is a 30 minute light spin.  Thursday is the same as Tuesday.  You need to put a few efforts in the day before the race.  For some reason, it keeps your legs feeling better for the race, instead of coming in with stale legs.  You don't want to do enough to get your legs tired, but just enough to blow out some cobwebs.

So that's my week, and I'm sticking to it.  I need to be better about following the plan.  Following the plan leads to good performances, something I have yet to do this year.

No comments:

Post a Comment