Day 23 - Power Meters

Training with a power meter isn’t for everyone. Some people just want to go out and ride. They don’t want to have a lot of structure. They want to do what they want to do, when they want to do it. They like going by feel. After the ride, they have no desire to go back and look at how the ride went — they know whether it was hard or easy and they don’t need a number to justify their workout.

Then there’s the other group of people who enjoy having a little more structured approach. They like to track their progress in charts and spreadsheets. They like being able to see exactly how well they rode today compared to last week. They start their training rides with a plan and enjoy executing the plan with precision. This is the group that power meters typically appeal to. 

Training with a power meter doesn’t automatically make you faster. It’s all about how you use it. I enjoy being able to know my threshold, and do a 20 or 30 minute interval according to how hard I should be able to go. I like being  able to pace those intervals with my power meter to make sure I don’t go out too hard and blow to pieces after a few minutes, or start to slack off around the halfway point, which seems to be my natural tendency. I like being able to pace myself for time trials so I can finish with the absolute highest average wattage I’m capable of, or pacing my bike in a tri to make sure I save enough in the tank for a good run split (ok…I’m still dialing this one in). I like being able to monitor my training load compared to the same time the previous year to make sure I’m putting in the work at the right time to build fitness just in time for race season and not too early or too late.

There’s plenty of stuff about training with power on the internet already. I’m not going to go into detail. If you want to learn more, check out posts by Andrew (Andy) Coggan, Hunter Allen (http://www.peakscoachinggroup.com/Articles.aspx), or Alex Simmons (http://alex-cycle.blogspot.com/). Those guys are way more knowledgeable about training with power than I am, so it’s much better if I send you there way than try to tell you myself. 

Between Sarah and I, we have experience with 4 different types of power meters. One is on our CycleOps Powersync trainer I talked about last week. It’s a great unit, but obviously only works for training indoors, which is a huge limitation. 

We both used CycleOps PowerTaps for years. PowerTap has been around for a long time, and are known to be accurate, reliable, easy to use, and affordable. My PowerTap kind of reminds me of a Garmin 500. It just works. There might be nicer options, but from a functionality standpoint, the PowerTap is a solid unit. So why did I switch? The main reason is because my new bike (like most new bikes) is 11 speed, and my PowerTap hub was too old to be 11-speed compatible. The newer PowerTap hubs are. If it wasn’t for this, I would use my PowerTap for a few more years. Since I had to get a new power meter, I decided to go with something crank-based instead so that I have power during racing and training. Since I train on different wheels than I race on, I was only able to measure power during training and not racing. I could have laced a power tap into my race wheels, but then I’d have to train on them all the time. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but for those of you with only 1 set of wheels, the PowerTap is a really nice option. 

My decision was between Stages and Quarq.

The Stages power meters are VERY affordable. The strain gauge is built into your left crank arm, so that’s the only part you need to change. The unit doesn’t add much weight. You can use it with any wheels you want. Stages is a bit frowned upon by some power snobs because they don’t think it is accurate enough. The stages unit just measures your left leg power and doubles it. If your left leg is pushing harder than your right leg, your number will artificially be too high. If your left leg is putting down less torque than the right leg, then your number will artificially be lower than it should be. For the level of accuracy I need, this doesn’t matter much at all. It might not be accurate enough for you to read differences in your cda (aerodynamic drag) between a 700x23 tire vs 700x25 like you could with an SRM, Quarq, or PowerTap, but I’ll leave that testing to the experts. For doing intervals based on power, knowing your FTP, monitoring training load, etc the Stages seems to be accurate enough. It’s cool that it support Bluetooth AND ANT+ so you can use your phone to access the PM or your Garmin. Updating firmware is a piece of cake. This is the unit Sarah uses. We had some problems with it losing connection to her garmin for a few months, but they recently sent us a new unit after all of the troubleshooting they had us do didn’t fix it. I think we just had a bad unit. It doesn’t seem to be a common issue with Stages at all. I know many people who use them without any problem at all. If it wasn’t for the 4-6 week wait to get one, I probably would have gone this direction too.

Instead, I chose Quarq. I only have one ride on it, so it’s a little too early for me to give a big review. Quarq is a product of SRAM, and if you ever dealt with SRAM you know that their customer service is second to none. It’s amazing. SRAM has replaced many things for me, no questions asked. Whenever I can support SRAM, I try to. The Quarq was quite a bit more expensive than the Stages, but the availability was great (Schlegel’s was able to order mine and get it in within a week) and I’ve read really great things about the Quarq. They have a few different models available. I went with the Riken. It’s quite a bit less expensive than the Red or the Elsa. It doesn’t give you your right or left foot balance, but I didn’t really want that anyway. I don’t see much benefit in it. Even if my right leg was 5% weaker than my left foot, I’d rather spend time making both stronger than risk losing strength in one to try and build strength in the other. Just my 2 cents on that. 

A lot of people seem to like the Garmin pedals too. I haven’t tried them. I don’t see much benefit in them over a stages or quarq. People talk about how easy they are to swap. You still need to take both pedals off and torque them at the correct specs or else you risk them being inaccurate (and I don’t have a torque wrench in the size I need). My quarq is held on with one bolt. Since my road bike and TT bike accept GXP bottom brackets, it’s probably a 3 minute swap at most to go between my road and TT bikes. The Stages might even be easier to change than the quarq, especially if you already have the same drive side crank on all your bikes. Plus, it’s a little weird that the Garmin team uses SRM power meters instead of the ones made by their title sponsor. Perhaps they are getting paid good money to do that, but it’s very odd marketing move to me. I’m not trying to diss on the Garmin pedals. I have teammates that absolutely love them. One is Bob, and he’s super particular about equipment. If they weren’t great, he wouldn’t use them. I’m just saying that for me, the benefits of the garmin weren’t high enough for me to justify the added expense. 

I’ve never used an SRM, but like the Garmin pedals, the benefits don’t seem to justify the cost. The Power2max gets great reviews too, but I don’t personally know anyone using it, so I can’t give an honest opinion of that PM either. I’ve seen the pioneer on a few bikes, but it just seems like a lot of money to spend on the “new kid on the block.” Again, I don’t need lab-grade accuracy for what I do. 

Day 22 - Riding at Night

If you work full time but still want to be competitive in the spring races, you either have to ride indoors or you have to do some of your riding outdoors at night. The days are still short right now, so unless you can get off at 4:00, you’re riding in the dark for at least a little bit if you want to get in a good workout. Night riding is fun anyway. With the correct taillight, I feel very visible on city streets. With the right headlight, the river trail or lake hefner make great spots to get in long intervals at night. There’s hardly anyone out there when it’s cold and dark. The river trail is pretty much uninterrupted for 6 or 7 miles. No road crossings. You can get some great FTP intervals in out there.

The other thing I like about riding at night is how peaceful everything seems. Somehow it seems like the darkness enhances your hearing. When you’re out in the country, you can hear all the leaves blowing around and animals moving around in the woods next to you. I don’t notice those sounds as much in the daylight. 

The first thing you need for night riding is a good headlight and taillight. For the taillight, I already recommended the Serfas Thunderbolt. For a headlight, there’s no better bang-for-the-buck light than the Bontrager Ion 700. I actually just bought this light this week. It is a 700 lumen light that retails for $99. That’s insane!

Even though I just got this light, I have no problem recommending it; mostly because I researched the heck out of lights before buying it. I couldn’t find any negative reviews. MTBR called it the best light in the 700 lumen category. Bicycle magazine recommended it. Subjectivecyclist.blogspot.com loved it. Countless other reviews had positive feedback on the light. The Light and Motion Urban series lights seemed to be the most direct comparison. Those lights are very good too, but the bontrager is smaller and costs less. Both are bright, both have nice beam patterns. Check out http://reviews.mtbr.com/review-bontrager-ion-700 or http://subjectivecyclist.blogspot.com/2013/11/fall-2013-light-shootout-beam.html  for some pics of the beam pattern.

My first night ride was about 4 or 5 years ago on a mountain bike. Before I went to the ride, I asked some other riders about their light setup. Most of the guys that were going to the ride were talking about spending hundreds of dollars on their lights. I laughed to myself, went home and grabbed a $5 LED flashlight from my junk drawer, and taped it to my handlebars. It lit up the whole garage. I patted myself on the back for being a thrifty genius. When I showed up to the ride, it was already pitch black outside. I parked, took my bike out of the car, turned on the flashlight, pointed my bike towards the woods, and realized that whether the light was turned on or off, it didn’t really make a difference. It didn’t even shine far enough to light up the woods 10 feet in front of me. I ended up getting sandwiched between two guys with “real” bike lights and was able to see ok thanks to their investment, but if I got dropped I would have been lost in the woods longer than the blair witch project. 

After that, I bought a Serfas True 250. I thin kit was the brightest Serfas light at the time. It was 250 lumens for about $150. Pretty sweet deal. I actually bought two, and still use them both. Compact size, only take a few seconds to swap batteries, and 250 lumens is quite a bit; however, the batteries died pretty quick (about 90 minutes) when running at 250 lumens, or even quicker when it’s cold outside. Since I really only ride in the dark in the winter time, it’s always cold so the battery always died quickly unless I ran it at 180 lumens or less. For commuting around town under the streetlights, that’s fine. Out in the country it’s a little more sketchy. I would often be riding too quickly to really see what I was riding into. The lens on this particular light put off a pretty concentrated beam, so you could see great exactly where the light was pointed, but everything else is black. I thought it was fine, but the truth is that I was pretty ignorant to high much better the newer lights are. 

The light industry has pretty much exploded in the past few years. Lights are getting smaller, brighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting. I really can’t think of something in cycling that has made more rapid advancement lately than lights. Maybe electronic shifting, but the price is still really high on that. 

Tuesday night I purchased and tried out the Bontrager Ion 700. This thing is bright. Real bright. At 700 lumens, it runs for 1:45. That’s longer than my Serfas lasted at 250. At 450 lumens, it has a 3 hour runtime. I left the light at 450 for most of my ride last night. It was only slightly more dim looking than at 700, but at nearly double the runtime I figured it was worth it. At 250 lumens it lasts over 6 hours!

The mounting bracket is pretty easy. It took 2 seconds to put on my bars, and seemed secure. It just uses silicone straps. You can easily swap it to different bars that are different sizes. It didn’t seem to bounce much at all. The light itself is smaller than I expected. It’s a pretty nice form factor. The button on the top changes color as the light starts to die, just like the Serfas did. 

The beam pattern is what I’m most impressed with. On both 700 lumen mode and 450 mode, it wasn’t a really focused beam like the Serfas. The light is more spread out, but still crazy bright. You can see off to the left and right, not just where the light is directly pointed. I was way more comfortable riding the river trail, because I was able to see the critters to my left and right before they ran out onto the trail and were right in front of me.  My old light made it difficult to go around some of the corners out there. The focused beam just made it look like the trail disappeared, but with the wider beam you can see the corner coming, and you get a better visual on where the trail goes.

Day 21 - Cheap Tools for Bike Repairs at Home

A good multi tool has nearly everything you need, but there are a few separate tools every cyclist should have. Either they are too big for a multitool, or they just make life easier. 

First, every semi-serious rider should have the tools required to remove a cassette. You definitely need a chain whip like a Park HCW-16, and you definitely need the cassette lockring tool, like a Park FR-5. The chain whip is about $25. The reason I wish I had the HCW-9 is because it also has a 15mm pedal wrench built into the back side. Two tools for the price of one, basically. The cassette lockring tools are about $10 or less. I already had a big adjustable wrench to fit the lockring tool, so there was no extra expense there. Park and other companies sell long wrenches to fit the lockring tool, but an adjustable wrench is totally fine. That’s $35 well spent. Now you can switch your gearing to match the route you are riding, you can take your cassette apart and clean it, or you can swap your cassette from one set of wheels to another. 

Next is a set of metric ball end hex wrenches. I got mine from Steve’s Tools for under $10. Harbor Freight has basically the same ones for under $10 too. Make sure it goes down as small as a #2 (2mm) and up to 10mm. That will give you a small enough wrench to remove your brake pad cartridges, and large enough to remove cranks. The ball end is really great for hard-to-reach bolts. For example, the bolts to mount your sram shifters to your bars. It’s really difficult to get a multi tool at the right angle to get to these bolts. Same thing with bottle cages. Some cages are easier than others. An L-shaped hex wrench with a ball end will give you leverage to loosen the bolt, and the you can switch to the ball end to quickly unscrew them without having to constantly take your wrench off the bolt, rotate it, and figure out where it fits again. $10 well spent. 

Next is a Park CC-2 Chain Checker. Actually, a CC-3.2 is a way better purchase at 1/3 of the cost of the CC-2, but the CC-2 looks cooler, which is how I got suckered into buying it. The nice thing with the CC-2 is that you can see when your chain is .25, .5, .75, 1.0 or anything in between. The CC-3.2 is just a “go/no go” kind of tool. Chain replacement is really important. A worn chain will quickly wear your cassette and chainrings. Plus, it won’t shift as well. Waiting too long to replace your chain will cost you a lot more money since you will have to change out more stuff. Changing the chain out too soon is also a waste of money since your not getting all the miles you can out of a chain. You can also use a ruler to measure the chain, but a chain checker is easier. You can get a decent idea of how stretched your chain is by shifting into your 53/11 (or biggest gear) and grab the chain at 3 o’clock as you’re looking at your crankset. Pull the chain towards 3 o’clock and if the chain lifts, your chain is starting to stretch. Depending on how much of a chainring tooth you see, it might be time to swap chains. It’s a really rough measurement, so you are way better off with a real chain checker or ruler. 

Last, the Bontrager Preset Torque Wrench. Did you know that too much torque on your seat post clamp or stem bolts could cause a lot of damage to your bike (and face)? With most carbon steerer tubes, handbars, and seat posts, the manufacturer recommends using 5Nm of torque. “Real” torque wrenches are pricey. For $20, you can get Bontrager’s preset torque wrench with a 4mm hex key. The 4mm fits most stem bolts and seatpost clamps, but not all. It’s a nice tool to have at a race. You never know when a crash is going to knock your saddle or bars out of adjustment, and you want to make sure you can properly torque the bolts after you readjust them. On a side note, this is also a great tool for speed skaters. I usually tighten my wheel axels with it before I race, since they are also 4mm. 

Day 20 - Bontrager RXL Waterproof Softshell Shoe Cover

We've had some pretty amazing weather in OKC for the past week, so this post seems a little out of place. I'm not naive enough to think that winter is over yet. It seems like we always get a brutal spell of weather in February and even March.

For years I've been stubborn and I've tried to take the cheap way out, and for years I've struggled to keep my feet warm. I've tried multiple pairs of socks, thin socks, thick socks, wool socks, chemical handwarmers in my shoes, embrocation on my feet, socks over my shoes, plastic bags over my feet, plastic bags over my shoes, and probably some other things I can't even remember.

Up until this year, I usually stuck to wool socks (I'm a crappy vegan) on my feet, plastic bags over the outside of my shoes with holes in the bottom around the cleats, and a lycra shoe cover over that. That combo was cheap and somewhat effective. The bags would help keep the wind out. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was ok. Even with all this stuff on my feet, on the coldest days I would be in pretty intense pain by the end of the ride due to cold feet. I remember one time I had to take my shoes off just to make sure my feet were ok. I didn't really know what to expect when I took my sock off.

This year I sprung for some Bontager RXL Waterproof Softshell shoe covers. We've had a pretty mild winter so far, but even on the coldest mornings and nights I haven't had pain from cold feet. The inside of the covers has a thick fuzzy material. It's almost like a faux fur you'd see on the inside of a hoodie. The outside is a windproof material. They are really simple to pull on over your shoes and zip up, if you get the right size. At first I couldn't find a numerical size, so I grabbed a large. They were too small and were nearly impossible to get zipped. Then I realize the size was on a tag inside the cover, and saw that for my shoe size I needed a XXL. I think the XXL is a little large for my simmons shoes. An XL probably would have been just right.

They call them waterproof, but I've had water get in them through the cleat holes in the bottom. If I bought them a size smaller, maybe that wouldn't happen. They velcro at the top and you can get them as tight as you want, so I don't think water gets in that way.

These covers, paired with wool socks, is a really great solution. Even when the sun comes out and the temps rise, my feet haven't gotten too hot in them. I'd much rather have warm feet than cold feet anyway.

Hands and feet are the hardest things to keep warm on the bike. The investment of nice gloves and shoe covers is totally worth it. They should last many seasons if you take care of them. If yo want to ride outside in the winter time, you'll definitely get your moneys worth out of them.

Day 19 - Love your team

Cycling is a team sport. Maybe not in the traditional sense of basketball, football, baseball, etc., but your teammates can definitely have an outcome on your result, and you can definitely have an impact on the team’s results. Like the more traditional sports, you’ll probably spend a lot of time training with your teammates, so you want to make sure you actually like them. 

I’m blessed to be with a group of guys that I really like. Many of them are like family. I look forward to riding with them, traveling with them, and seeing them off the bike too. That’s how a team should be. If you don’t feel that way, I suggest you either make an attempt to integrate yourself more into the team, or you start searching for a new one. Cycling (at my level, at least) is all about having fun. I’m not collecting a paycheck for racing my bike, so I better be having a good time. Even on the weekends where our team has horrible finishes, or we made lots of mistakes, or we had awful weather, I’m still making awesome memories because of the group of guys I’m with. 

Our team is also pretty well rounded. We have some talented sprinters, some crafty/sly racers, some breakaway guys that can put down big watts, and general well rounded guys that can do a little of each. On paper we’ve got what it takes to win; we just need to learn to race better together. I still consider us a pretty young team. We haven’t all raced together very long. Each year we get better and better, but we still have a lot of room for improvement. It’s a good thing, really. It means that in 2015 we should have even better results that 2014, and 2014 was a good year. We proved last year that we can go toe-to-toe with any of the teams around here on our good days, but we also took some beatings on our bad days. There’s always going to be a balance point between good days and bad, but I think 2015 will have more of the former. 

It looks like a bunch of pro teams are doing their training camps now. I’ll admit, I'm slightly jealous of their team rides. First, because they are all in incredible places; but also because of the size. The rides just look so tidy and organized. It looks like a great environment for a team to really mesh and learn to communicate. We’ve been doing these big 50+ person rides, and I barely get to talk to my teammates. I don’t even realize that some guys are there until we’re 30+ miles into the ride. It’s fun getting to meet new people, and it’s great to see Oklahoma City cycling really come together. We’ve had riders from almost every Oklahoma team at our Saturday and/or Sunday rides. On one hand, it’s great. This is probably the most cohesive I’ve seen Oklahoma City cycling since I started riding. On the other hand, I know that it takes away from how tight our team is. Plus, your workout is diminished because after you peel off the front, it takes 30 minutes to get back up there again.  It’s a balancing act for sure. I want to see both flourish, but I’m a little bit at a loss on how to get there. Team rides at night during the week? Additional miles as a team before or after the ride Saturday and Sunday rides? The reality is, it’s really a 2016 problem now. Race season starts in 3 weeks, so the winter group rides are nearly coming to an end. The race schedule is pretty packed from February through June. 

Anyway, that wasn’t really the direction I planned on going here. I wanted to focus on really searching for a group of people that have common goals that you enjoy riding with. The majority of us do this for fun, so make sure you surround yourself with people that really make you feel good. Whether you prefer a 12 person, focused race team that trains together or a 50+ group of guys and girls that share your love of cycling; make sure you never lose site of how enjoyable cycling is. 

Day 18 - January cycling workouts, by Joey Mesa

My good friend and teammate Joey Mesa wrote down 3 of his favorite workouts for January. Thanks for giving me a day off from writing, Joey!

It seems like every week I get asked about what kind of riding I've been doing or a question about an interval that was on one of my strava rides. There's a few workouts I like to do around this point of the early road training season, and I thought I'd share 3 of my favorite ones. I'm starting into my last base period, so I've been trying to increase the intensity/training stress and put some of the final work in to raise my FTP (functional threshold power). If you're around a similar point in your season, you might give some of these workouts a try.

-2 x 20's. In my opinion, this probably the best all around "bang for the buck"workout there is, especially if you're short on training time. I'll start doing these around the start of my base period and pretty much continue this workout all the way through the race season as a maintenance ride. Early on I'll start doing the 2 x 20's maybe in the upper tempo zone (80-90% FTP) or 90-94% of your threshold heart rate if you don't have a power meter. It's a pretty simple workout. Warm up 10 minutes of so, go 20 minutes, do a recovery interval for 2-5 minutes, then another 20 minutes and then cool down for 10 minutes. Super easy to knock out on the trainer or if you have a 4 mile stretch of uninterupted road, you can do an out and back. I like the dam at Hefner for these. Gradually you'll want to increase the power to your sweet spot (88-94% FTP), maybe after 2-4 weeks, and eventually at threshold (91-105% FTP). I generally like to do these a couple times per week.

-Hour of Power. This is another workout that is good to do on the trainer or doing a couple laps at Hefner. There are a couple of variations, but basically warm up 10-15 minutes, hit the interval button and keep it in the sweet spot (88-94% FTP) for 1 hour. Every 3 minutes, drop a couple gears and stand up and do a 10 second burst. These take a lot of focus to keep track of the time until the next burst and keeping the pace in the correct range, but the hour goes by pretty quickly. I like doing these about a month or so out from the first race and as a tune up on non race weekends.

-Kitchen sink ride. Another workout with several different variations. I think there's 4 different types in the Training and racing with a power meter book, as well as if you google "kitchen sink ride", you'll find several more. The jist of the workout is that you work on basically every system or zone. There are a couple of variations of the kitchen sink ride I like to do as well. The first would be a group ride followed by 45 - 60 minutes of tempo or (if I got any legs left) sweet spot riding. Our team rides work well for this because you get plenty of endurance, some city limit sprints, some 3-8 minute VO2 max pulls at the front and some 30 sec to 2 min Anaerobic capacity roller hills.

The second version of this ride is usually best done solo. I usually just cruise and warm up for 20-30 minutes and then focus on working a different system each hour. I'll start with 2 x 20's at threshold, the second hour I'll do 6-8 sprints all out for 10-15 seconds, usually half in the little ring and half in the big ring. Recover for 5 minutes or so between each sprint. In the 3rd hour I'll do 4 or 5 x 5 minute VO2 max intervals at 106-120% FTP with 5 minutes of recovery between intervals. In the 4th hour I'll attempt 4-6 x 2 minute anaerobic capacity intervals at 121-150% FTP. These are normally the point where I start to crack and it gets difficult to keep the power in the correct range. You'll probably be running on fumes at this point, but the goal in the 5th hour is 45 minutes in the tempo zone.

The kitchen sink ride is great if you're preparing for a stage race, getting ready for a big training camp, or you want get lots more matches in your matchbook.

Day 17 - Performance Management Charts

This is probably a little nerdy for some of you. You've been warned. I'm trying to keep this as basic as possible.

I'm sure there are write-ups way better than this. If you already use a PMC, you probably know as much or more than I do. 

Performance Management Charts are pretty cool. They show your fitness, short term fatigue, and can predict if whether or not you'll have good form at a race. Most of the "big name" cycling apps have them. Strava, Training Peaks WKO, Golden Cheetah, etc.  Here's what you need to get started. 

• A powermeter. Technically, you could estimate training stress for each workout, but it won't be very accurate, therefor it wouldn't be of much value. So lets just say that you need a powermeter. Quarq, Powertap, Stages, etc. They'll all work. A powercal may or may not.
• You need to know your FTP. You'll need to enter that into your app of choice.
• At least 6 weeks of data in order to get any data, but 12 or more weeks are preferable. 
• Strava Premium ($), WKO ($$), Golden Cheetah (FREE). I use Golden Cheetah

Some quick definitions - way more detail is here, but I'm trying to keep this simple: http://home.trainingpeaks.com/blog/article/what-is-the-performance-management-chart

• Training Stress Score (TSS) - This is calculated for each ride. It's based off your FTP, so a 100 point ride for a pro and a 100 point ride for an amateur would create the same level of fatigue, but the distance or time could be way different. IF you say your FTP is higher than it actually is, all of the stats on your PMC will be low. If you sandbag your FTP and put in a low number, all the lines on the PMC will be too high. I'll just copy some TSS info from the training peaks site, since it gives a better explanation than I can.
  • You earn 100 TSS for an all out, 100%, 60-minute workout. Of course most workouts are not completed at 100%, so most workouts will accumulate less than 100 TSS per hour.
  • You can earn more than 100 TSS within a single workout (as long as it is longer than an hour), but never more than 100 TSS per hour.
  • Think of intensity as an RPE value on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the hardest. If you exercised at a level 5 for two hours, then you would accumulate 50 TSS/hour or 100 total points. It wouldn’t matter if you were training for the Tour de France or to simply complete your first triathlon.
• Chronic Training Load (CTL) - Basically, this is your long-term fatigue, but we will all it fitness. It his weighted average of you TSS over the last 6 weeks. The more you workout and harder you work out, the higher your CTL gets.  The higher your CTL, the more fit you are.
• Acute Training Load (ATL) - This is your short term fatigue, but we will just call it fatigue. It's a weighted average of your TSS over the last 7 days. I think you can adjust the number of days, but I think 7 is a good default. 
• Training Stress Balance (TSB) - This is your "form." It's a combo of training stress and rest. This is a predictor of how you will do on race day. When the line is going up, you'll perform better than when the line is going down. A positive number shows good form. IF the number is negative, you'll be too tired to have great form. 

Blah Blah Blah. Let's look at my PMC from last year and see if we can draw some conclusions. 

I took some time off after my ironman in August, so all my numbers started pretty low. You can see the blue (CTL) and pink (ATL) start increasing once I started training again. This means that my fitness is increasing, but so is my fatigue. That's why my green (TSB) line is going down. You can see that in general the TSB is exactly opposite of ATL.

My goal is to try and get the blue line as high as possible before the season starts (without cheating and sandbagging my FTP). This means riding lots and lots of miles as a moderate intensity. On Feb 3 it starts to level out a bit. A week before that was our training camp, and that's why my pink line (ATL) jumped up so high. You can see that my green line is at an all time low around training camp. If I was to race the day after camp, I would have been really tired and had bad form. After camp I took a recovery week. You can see that the pink line (ATL) drops a bit and the green line goes up. As the green line was going up, I raced at Cedar Hill and won. The PMC predicted a good race, and it was.

At this point on my chart, the blue line is pretty high. That means I'm carrying maximum fitness. Since I was focusing on mostly the spring races, it was time to "withdraw some fitness from the bank." Since I was racing every weekend and recovering during the week, the pink line started to slowly decline and the green line was slowly increasing. This meant that I more or less carried good form all the way until mid-to-late April. The weekend of Joe Martin I was actually at my highest TSB. Unfortunately, I didn't go race. Bummer. I did a TT the following week and set my all-time PR on that course. I think that the fact that I wasn't racing Joe Martin was a reason for me to take some extra rest, which is what caused my TSB to rise so much. Unfortunately, these easy weeks also dropped my CTL a bit. 

I felt great during that whole February - April stretch. I had pretty consistent results. No wins after Cedar Hill, but some results I'm proud of. After that stretch, it was time to try and raise my CTL a bit and get ready for crit season. You can see that I had a good 3 week build going into May. Then I probably took too much time off. I should have kept training a few more weeks in order to peak again for pro-am and tulsa tough. My TSB was really high at Tulsa Tough, but my fitness level (blue line) had already dropped some. I had some decent races, but nothing great to speak of. 

So there are some ways that I think a person could "trick" the PMC but not get good results. For example, if I took a full week completely off from riding, the TSB would jump way up; however, I don't think that means I would race good. I never feel good after a full week off. If I took two full weeks off, it would even be higher, but I think I would race even worse. 

TSB also doesn't know your strengths and weaknesses as a racer. If you are a poor climber with a high TSB going into a climbing race, it doesn't mean you'll win. You'll probably climb better than you would have with a lower TSB, but it doesn't turn you into a guy named Alberto. It also can't predict what will happen in a race. IF you miss the winning breakaway, you still lose the race, no matter what your TSB is. 

So the PMC isn't perfect, but it does seem to line up pretty well with how I felt last season. By having this data, I'm able to perform small tweaks to my training this season to figure out how to bring better form to the races I really care about...hopefully.