Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
By now, I can tell by looking at my PMC numbers and weather forecasts what I'll feel like doing on a particular day, That's kind of important because I'm in charge of The Sunday Group Ride. I leave my PMC set to display last 90 and next 21. OTOH if a workout arrives that I want to change or skip for whatever reason, I do that. Having a plan doesn't mean I have to follow it! No need to repeat the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have to clear my workout plan in advance or it doesn't happen. But at the end of the week, I get to assess whether or not I've met my goals, and if not, what to do about that. I'd really be at sea without them, but OTOH I've only been at this for a little over 20 years. Maybe I'll get better at it. Or maybe Friel was all wet with the huge manual about how to develop a training plan.
If having a daily plan works, it works. Just like not having a daily plan works. I went from a Tues threshold/Thurs vo2/Sat group ride race with Wed/Sun long steady rides for years while in college when my life revolved solely around riding, to what I've done for the last 6 years. I had success with both. I had more much more success with the latter, along with other things.
I'm not a fan of PMC. I don't think it correlates nearly as well as people were led to believe, and I don't think it shows nearly the information that some want it to show outside a set of very general parameters. You can jack CTL way, way, up, get TSB positive, and still suck at any number of performance metrics. Conversely, you can have amazing performances on low CTL, or low TSB, or high TSB, etc., etc. It's just a few pixels of a larger picture. And since it's based on NP, it needs fairly accurate numbers and can be skewed during certain blocks of specific work (notably work with very high repeated 30-90s max efforts). I can't even begin to figure out how a hr PMC would be more useful other than a very general descriptor, which I'd expect no one with more than a couple of years of riding experience would actually need. In the south, a HR PMC is virtually useless. CT:L would skyrocket in summer and TSB would be in perpetual negativity solely because of heat/humidity impact. And the bigger you are, likely the worse that would be.
Anyway, all that to say, I may have 2-3 key workouts I know I need to be able to hit in to be sufficiently prepared before a specific event. If I can build up to those and complete them, it matters not whether it's on a Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, whatever. We write training plans to fit into an arbitrary schedule of time, not necessarily because our biochemical processes are primed and ready to go.