"The 33"-Road Bike Racing - lowest ever TSB

Ok let's here from the PMC junkies and acronym fans. What's the lowest training stress balance you've ever had? How about the day of a race?

What do you try and get to on race day?

Ok, I'll bite.

My races never got me as low as long distance rides of +6 hours duration.

Last month I did back to back centuries (11/17 & 11/18) which yielded a TSB on the PMC of -55.9.

-64 tsb 10-15-07 was the lowest I could see.

WTH is TSB?

Oops, thought this was about Technical Service Bulletins from Toyota. :rolleyes:

WTH is TSB?


Ok let's here from the PMC junkies and acronym fans. What's the lowest training stress balance you've ever had? How about the day of a race?

What do you try and get to on race day?

In bold above.

In bold above.

I read that. I also can gather the meaning. What's the calculation?

I read that. I also can gather the meaning. What's the calculation?

You'll have to read it from here:

https://www.cyclingpeakssoftware.com/power411/performancemanager.asp

Oh, what the heck:


Training Load can come in many ways, but let's categorize them based on duration to begin with. We call the cumulative affect or impact of training that has been done as long as 6 weeks ago, the 'Chronic Training Load' (CTL). CTL can be shorter than six weeks or it may be longer, that is up for debate, however let's just consider the fact that the workouts that you did 3 weeks ago are impacting you as well and most likely with a slightly higher impact than those done six weeks ago. What about the workouts that you did this past weekend? Or yesterday? We call these the 'Acute Training Load' (ATL) and these too impact your performance today and into the future. Let's consider the more 'near term' workouts as all the workouts you have done in the last 14days up to yesterday, and for ease of use, we'll use 7 days for your ATL.

CTL=Long term effects- workouts done 15 days ago and older
ATL=Short term effects- workouts done in the last 14 daysSo, now that we have introduced the concepts of CTL and ATL, let's remind ourselves about 'form'. Form is the proper balance of fitness and freshness. Fitness is based on training stress or training load, so based on this simple equation, we can rename 'form', "Training Stress Balance"(TSB)*.

I read that. I also can gather the meaning. What's the calculation?

Weird, but true: If you type "training stress balance" into Google, the first return is a link to an explanation of the concept. Amazing what you can do with five seconds and a bit of gumption.

To answer the OP's question, the lowest I've seen is -47 or so, twice this past year.

Oops, thought this was about Technical Service Bulletins from Toyota. :rolleyes:

:beer:

You'll have to read it from here:

https://www.cyclingpeakssoftware.com/power411/performancemanager.asp

Oh, what the heck:

Thanks.

Amazing what you can do with five seconds and a bit of gumption.

Interesting. Oh wait, already bored.

-33 was my lowest this year

for races I like to be around +15

I've set PRs for 5 sec, 1 min, 5 min and FTP w TSB ranging from -9 to +4

gene r

This is a good thread- made me go back and look. I went lower than -60 three times last year. Lowest was -68.3. All from many successive days with long rides and a lot of climbing. On two of them I was still coming back from being off for a month due to a crash. One was right before an operation that was going to take me off the bike for a week or so- I planned to really wipe myself out since I knew I'd have plenty of time to recover. On two of them I had to call my wife to come pick me up since I was too wiped out to make the difficult climb home.

Lowest since 9-1 has been -59.8. I race around -5. I'm going to try +5 to see what it does for me.

-50.74 last December. @130-140 CTL I can't get that low anymore.

Maybe it's just me, but without a good workout or two the week before a race, I come out flat and it won't be pleasant. I have to open it up for at least 10min at a pretty hard effort the day before, and throw in some 1min and sprints after that.

My best race of the year came the third day of racing in a row, after two 50 mile crits, at a 62 mile RR.

I'm toying around with that right now. I went into the State Cross race at +15 TSB with the previous days Wed- 1 hour Z2 with spinups, Thurs-easy 90 minutes on the trainer, off Friday and 35 minutes Saturday with some spinups and 1 minute efforts. Sunday I felt terrible. I actually think I may need to be slightly negative for a good race.
This week is a harder week(around 14 hours) and I'm racing Sunday, probably in the negative range. We'll see how that goes.

-42 is my yearly low. This was at the height of training over in the Rockies with day after day of awesome climbing.

Neal Henderson at BCSM suggests being at least at +10 for an important race and +20 for a big stage race... something to think about as I would guess most of us don't hit that.



Maybe it's just me, but without a good workout or two the week before a race, I come out flat and it won't be pleasant. I have to open it up for at least 10min at a pretty hard effort the day before, and throw in some 1min and sprints after that.

My best race of the year came the third day of racing in a row, after two 50 mile crits, at a 62 mile RR.
Any chance almost all the other guys raced the same races?

Also, a ten minute opener won't budge your TSB most likely.

-64 tsb 10-15-07 was the lowest I could see.

That because you've got your darn FTP set 20 watts low.

Sandbagging the PMC...surprised you're not still racing Cat 5 and the "C's" :)

70.4, during "worthless" base last year.

CTL,TSB Pre-race,Race TSS,TSB Post Race,Placing
118.61 10.31 115.8 9.18 8
120.88 5.67 142 2.28 6
123.37 26.46 267.1 5.15 5
118.72 9.79 164.8 2.78 1
120.17 20.3 408.7 -17.79 1
116.5 4.36 242.7 -11.65 4
126.41 1.45 105.4 3.81 2
133.44 9.88 116.1 10.59 1
137.01 9.85 176.4 3.64 1


My preferred technique is to have enough TSB "in the bank" to not go below zero in the race. That seems to work well for me in hard workout days when I'm already positve TSB and so far has worked well during races as well. You can generally count on how much TSS a race will cost you.

That because you've got your darn FTP set 20 watts low.

Sandbagging the PMC...surprised you're not still racing Cat 5 and the "C's" :)

70.4, during "worthless" base last year.

WKO+ is not susceptible to false reading from user defined values ;) That was after bumping up the ftp.

And I'd still ride the c's if I could. :D