Performance Management

I think most triathletes understand the idea of "tapering" before a big race - basically reducing your training volume in the days/weeks leading up to your priority race in order to feel fresh and have good form on race day. And I think everyone gets the idea of "progressive overload" - that the volume and intensity of your training will increase over the course of your season in order to keep the body adapting to training stress.

In that sense, performance management isn't rocket science. You keep your training progressing, and then you scale it back as you approach a big race. You don't need any fancy analytics to do that, but there are lots of cool tools out there to help this process, removing the guesswork and ensuring you're in top form for your "A" race.

I'm reading Coggan and Allen's Training and Racing with a Power Meter, and they delve into performance management quiet a bit. Their process, which is based on your Training Stress Score (TSS) and how those numbers change over time, results in a cool graphical representation of how your fitness and form evolve over the season.

To this point I've only really looked at what TrainerRoad provides in terms of TSS tracking.

You can see that the overall weekly TSS gradually increases over the last 6 weeks before dropping down - the idea here was a recovery week at the end of my base phase, in preparation for a new FTP test to kick off the build phase.

Coggan and Allen use TrainingPeaks (online) and/or WKO+ (software) to track these metrics, but there are plenty of other sites/software that do similar things. Golden Cheetah is a free open-source piece of software that seems to pretty much cover all the bases. In it, you can see a different (and more detailed) representation of the same ride data that TrainerRoad was using.

Here you can see my Acute Training Load and Chronic Training Load increasing over the past few months as my fitness increases. You can also see the ATL drop off at the end as I scaled things back, actually dipping below my CTL, resulting in a positive balance (i.e. good form). This is the type of situation I'd like to create on race day, and in this case is where I would have performed my FTP test. Unfortunately a nasty stomach bug intruded on these plans - we'll see where I'm at when I get to it later this week.

I'm still in "Base" mode for my running, and will remain there until I can get outside and do some speedwork and longer runs. Then I'll get to tracking run and swim TSS and get an overall picture of my fitness. I don't see this type of software as a "game changer", since the fundamentals of performance management are pretty basic, but I like the easy way to visualize my fitness and using this will be interesting in terms of planning up to my races, and when I do my post-season retrospective.