Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
Agreed. "There's a flaw in everything." CTL is calculated off TSS, which is calculated off Normalized Power™, and also has a default decay rate, so there's a whole chain of assumptions where B may not be implied by A after all. I've done a 3 hour ride and gotten a TSS of over 300. I happen to have some talent for repeating short hard efforts but a crappy aerobic system. The last couple miles were torture, so the 300 number felt about right. It's complicated. We do the best we can with the information available and more information is better if one knows what to do with it, IMO.
Yeah, you have to work out how to use the numbers on a personal basis. For example I find 100 TSS from a full gas 1 hour effort requires significantly more recovery than 100 TSS from an easy 3 hour ride. To me they are not the equivalent numbers they represent in the "model".
By definition, it should be impossible to generate a TSS of 300 on a 3 hour ride. 100 TSS is supposed to represent an all out 1 hour effort at FTP. So it would just mean that your FTP was set way too low.