2015 season primer

So it's almost time to get the season going. I haven't kept this thing up very well, but I've kinda made it a goal to post something each Sunday or Monday to keep the racing stuff updated. Hopefully more on board race videos too. The winter base phase has gone about as well as I could have hoped for. In fact, I think this may be the first base period where my power meter data looks about as textbook as it gets. Click on graphs to enlarge.

Weekly training stress in green and intensity factor in yellow.

A few years ago I switched from going off time and/or miles to using TSS to determine  my weekly training load. It's pretty easy to see the classic 3 weeks on - 1 week off base period. Historically, I've usually always gotten sick or something comes up or a bad weather week etc. that causes the schedule to get thrown off, so I'm pretty pleased with the winter so far. The tallest green bar was from our training camp week. I started my build phase a couple of weeks ago and this week was the first one that the weather and life shortened things, but this is the time of year when we generally start racing, so the weeks normally get shorter but harder. This past week was short but looking at the intensity factor dot, it was my hardest week intensity wise this season so far.

My Performance Manager Chart from last June until now.

I let my fitness dwindle pretty low last October, but I wanted to be as rested as possible when my base period started.  If you're not familiar with the PMC graph, the blue line is chronic training load =current fitness. The pink line is acute training load = current fatigue and the yellow section is training stress balance = current form. The black dots are my top 10 - 20 minute efforts and the orange dots are my to 10 - 60 minute efforts from last June until now.
I usually start feeling pretty good race wise once my chronic training load gets over 90ish or so. Right now it's just under 100. Rob and Micah have already raced a couple of races each. Hopefully next weekend we'll all get to race together next weekend in Arkansas. The weather is looking iffy right now, but either way, I'll update next week.