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Been a while since I posted a log on here. Thought I would post where I'm at as I work towards my last mountain bike race of the season. I've gone back and forth on how well I've been sticking to my training. I had a pretty disappointing race in August. I felt like I was in pretty decent shape, but raced the course blind, and broke a pedal (again) on a pedal strike after about 20 minutes. I rode through it, but took a little bit before I noticed that if I flipped it around I could still clip in. I did however go down probably the most technical descent before I figured that out, foot slipped off the pedal right at the bottom, which could've been a lot worse. I think I finished in just under 50 minutes, about 8 minutes behind 1st in my division. I also would've benefited from knowing the course, there were a LOT of tight blind corners, which I probably slowed down too much for. I felt like I was faster fitness wise than i have been all year. That being said, its pretty late in the season, and I definitely did less consistent training than I was aiming for, and it showed. When I would get passed, I'd try to hang onto the wheel of the guys infront, and I just couldn't. Definitely something to improve on for the next. So that brings me to today. Here's the performance management chart I pulled from Golden Cheetah since that race, through today, and projecting to my next race at Pando. Last race was on the 27th, which I had tapered for, and you can see the my stress balance (yellow chart) blip positive. In hind sight, I probably would've been better off to simply plan to build through that race, not taper at all, and then continue to build for the last races of the year. I had two races I was tentatively going to attend, and decided that I would rather train through those and just focus on the one end of season instead. So that's what I did. Been focusing on bringing up my training volume week over week, while working on not going too much into the red, since I really don't want to overtrain and get sick (again). My fitness was at about 25 LTS for my last race, its at 45 today. I've noticed since increasing my weekly training volume, I'm carrying a lot more fatigue in my legs. I was using the charts at Training Peaks, which are similar, but recently migrated my data to Golden Cheetah, since its free. The numbers aren't exactly comparable between the two, but the graphs are pretty much the same. Golden Cheetah shows my LTS and stress balance a little higher. So I didn't include a legend in my screenshot. Purple: Short term stress. Weighted average of the past 7 days. This is roughly your current acute fatigue. Blue: Long term stress. Weighted average over the past 42 days. This is roughly your current fitness. Yellow: Stress balance. Difference between LTS and STS. This is basically a fatigue-o-meter. When increasing volume you want to keep it negavitve, but not too negative or you start over training. Somewhere around -10 to -30 is good for progression. Also useful for race readyness, as you don't want to be carrying a lot of fatigue into an important race. Should be a bit positive after an ideal taper. And not shown in the screenshot used to derive all the data points: Training Stress Score: Numerical representation of how intense a given workout was. 100 points == threshold heart rate for an hour. More or less points will be assigned based on the intensity and duration of the workout. Most of my workouts are between 50 - 150 TSS. Last week was one of the higher TSS weeks I've done in a long while, totaled 457 TSS at 6.6 hours riding time. Today is a rest day. TSB is showing -36 and quite frankly, my legs are still tired. I had good rides in the last two days though. I should be set to ride again tomorrow though. Goal for this week is to get in about 6ish hours again, while keeping my TSB somewhere around the -20 to -30 range. I don't think I have enough time left to increase volume much more before my race, so I'm thinking I can probably keep my LTS around 45ish while working on bringing down my fatigue a little. Hopefully that'll be enough to notice a bit of a difference for the race at Pando. /end-background-story BATTLE LOG 9/11/17 Over under intervals 3x 2min1min w/ 3 min rest FTP: 190 watts Over: 230 under: 180 Rest: ~120 Time: 40 mins TSS: 52 These were hard, I was short on time, so I figured I could get in a quick workout before picking up the baby from daycare. Cut down recovery time between interval sets to save time. Definately put out a good hard effort, started strong, but these got hard pretty fast. First few weren't too bad, but the 2nd and 3rd sets were tough! I finished strong though, was able to push through for the last interval to slowly raise the effort above 230. I was increasing my cadence by 1 every 15 seconds for that last interval, and then after I hit time on my interval, continued to ramp up power until about ~300 over the next 30 seconds, and then held 300 for 30 seconds until I pretty much blew up. Short warm down and that was it.