Falling Like A Stone

My CTL that is. Planning or seeding my PMC as I do with myself and the athletes that I look after, I see that by March 14th, I will have "given back" in terms of CTL roughly 1.5 TSS/day over the last 6 weeks corresponding to my VO2max focus. This will have it settle in right around 80 for the Spring Series, the first CRCA club races and I plan to keep it right there through Battenkill.

I've always thought that the quote by wattage group frequent poster Tom Annalt, "FTP is how hard you can go...CTL is how long you can go hard" is pretty true. This is about the lowest CTL I've carried since the introduction of the PMC back in '05... 100 TSS/day has always been my number.

Why the difference this year? Well, simply put, I want to be able to go harder! So far, so good...FTP is staying put, as is evident by my threshold maintenance workouts every 6 days. As I'd hoped, I've picked up ~5% in terms of power at VO2max in the last 3 weeks. I'm looking for another 5%. Doing this type of intense training requires a great deal more recovery time than threshold training. As a matter of fact, I listened to a webinar by Andy Coggan last night and he said training at VO2max releases more catecholemines than getting into a car accident wherein you break several bones! It is the inclusion of more recovery time that has brought my overall volume down.

Out of curiosity, I rode the Lion's Flanders loop with him Saturday. Very hard, hilly 44 mile loop in <2 hrs. on open roads in 30F temperatures... just to see 'how long I could go hard'. I found holding .9 IF almost easy. I floated up hills over VO2max power beside the Lion wondering if this power meter was broken or he was tired. I've certainly re-zeroed it before when I was sure it was reading low, but I found myself wondering if it was too high. Nope. Spot on.