Originally Posted by
globecanvas
I really don't know what the right thing to do is with respect to TSS for hikes and whatnot. I do some hiking and rock scrambling with the family most weekends, maybe 1-2 hours/week and it's usually not very strenuous and not really aerobic at all and I never put in any TSS for it. Over the past few days though we've done about 6 hours of mostly rock scrambling, still not really aerobic, breaking a sweat but not breathing hard, a lot of high stepping and other leg muscle use. My legs are definitely feeling it -- walking downstairs hurts.
If I call all of that hiking the equivalent of 150w JRA then I get a current TSB of -20. If I don't give it any TSS at all I'm at -4.
Today I did a short ride that I often do when pressed for time, a 100 ft/mile loop that I can finish in just under an hour if I hammer it out, doing the climbs at Z4 and the flats at Z3. It's very humid and I was suffering on the ride. Managed to do it in under an hour but had weird chills and just ridiculous amounts of sweat for a long time after I got home.
There are always a lot of moving parts to trying to conclude anything from how a particular day goes but I feel absolutely buried right now, much more like -20 than -4. I mean, maybe I'm getting sick or reacting badly to the weather or there's something else going on. Or maybe the recent non-cycling activity generated a lot of fatigue without contributing to fitness, which doesn't fit into the TSB model at all. All I really know is that I feel hammered flat right now.
i hear ya.
as you know, i'm a big fan of collecting high-quality data, but the question becomes what does one do with that data.
CTL was never meant to represent what is going on in someone's life, and it was never intended to mix activities. i've long been a fan of using other metrics as an attempt to objectively capture how the various off-the-bike things we do factor into our readiness to train and race on the bike.
Mowing the lawn, a stressful day at work, a strenuous hike, or an easy walk with the dog -- they all affect us in some way.
i think the trouble i have with bothering factoring all of this into the mix is that we're exceeding what CTL was meant to do.
yes, it's convenient to have a number, and there are lots of ways to create a value for TSS other than power (hrTSS, or just guessing), but in the end it is adding apples and oranges.
even the notion of adding TSS from, say, a sprint workout to an endurance workout gets kind of silly: you and I could both sit at 110 CTL and have gotten there with the same TSS every day, but depending on how we accumulated that TSS on any given day would dramatically change how we perform.
this brings me back to why i don't really worry about it: i don't really care about CTL at all. you have to know how each athlete (or how you) arrived at that CTL, which means the there is so much that is NOT in the numbers already.
at that point, might as well track "readiness to train" (subjective), or morning/resting HR, or HRV.
my attempts to quantify an overall 'life stress score' have been interesting, but in the end for an athlete who is in-tune with his/her body, i can't be certain it's better than a diary on how one feels each morning.
now, i do think the data is very important when you're working with it at a granular level and working toward improvements, but i feel like the PMC tends to be
descriptive when people really want it to be
predictive. that's where things get messy at best and useless at worst. it doesn't do such a great job at prediction.
your "i feel about like -20" is probably a better thing to add as a daily metric than anything else. if i were working with you, i'd want to know that as a coach.