2006 Season in Review

The nice thing about having a Power Tap is that it allows you to step back and look at your season from an almost scientific viewpoint rather than trying to remember by feel what I was going through during any given part of the season. One of the benefits about being friends with Scott Thor is he can make some pretty cool images for you if you ask nicely and send him a little data. Thanks to Scott for putting the images together for me. Below is a chart that shows my TSS (Training Stress Score) rolling totals for the 2006 season. I’ve highlighted some key points on these to try and put some reason to why things look the way they do. (You will want to click on the image to make it larger for you to view the fine points).

One thing I want to make mention of is the loss of my power tap for several weeks. That didn’t mean I stopped riding while it was back at the shop, that just meant I wasn’t collecting data which explains why all three values above drop sharply off. Unfortunately, Cycling Peaks doesn’t allow me to manually insert my workouts so I regrettably have to interpolate my data for the remainder of the season. This is a good reason to have a backup PT, now if I could only convince my wife!

To further complicate things, Scott has included for me a chart showing my Peak Normalized Power for the 2006 season. The interesting thing is that my peak FTP for the season (314 Watts) comes after my goal event. After that event, I honestly let up on my structured training program and went more to riding with my buddies in lieu of the interval workouts I had been doing previously. I would theorize that if I had stuck with the program further into the year, that I could have been able to push that FTP up higher, or at least kept it a little more stable as it begins to show a slight downward slope.

This chart showing my ATL, CTL and TSB. Together, I could have used this to predict and tailor my peaks a little more accurately.

So what does all of this really mean? That’s a good question and I’m not sure if I fully know or understand yet how I will fully use this information for my 2007 season. What I can tell you is this, last year I felt like there were times when I had the best form of my life and was unstoppable, and then there were those times where I just felt absolutely lousy. All of that is typical for any rider I guess. The thing for me to do is to now evaluate what I was doing during each of those bad times to determine whether I was feeling off due to my training load, work load here in the office, illnesses or whatever and then determine what I need to do to try and avoid having those severe lows when I'm aiming for those few races where I really want to do something special. I can also take a look at those times when I was really feeling on form, try to match that up to what my CTL was during that time period and try to shoot for that as an optimal goal for my peak events here during the 2007 season.

brian