its really a meaningless comparison. mine varies month to month but Oct has been 30.75 hours thus far at 69 tss/hr avg and I just did an hour at ftp last week so I know it is right. sept was only 61/hr over the entire last year I hav avg ~65/hr ctl currently 110 and dropping probably will drop below 100 for first time in 3 years this winter as I back off to start up again in new year. have been doing 775 tss on 10.75 hours/wk last 2 weeks. recovery for me is fine all has to change as I just started my last year in the 40s today, recovery is bound to switch. the more polarized I do, the lower the avg. SS....can do day in day out

Hmmm.

Another single sport-er here. I tend to do 5-6 short rides per week, maybe one of them will be 2-2.5 hours. Now I'm starting to think I'm riding way too hard. Take this week 4 short rides (approx 1hr each), TSS/Hr of 79. Typically my numbers are closer to 70. Granted it's been too long since I tested my FTP and it may be a couple points low but I don't think I could move it up even 1%.

If I'm not doing a structured workout I'll usually throw in a couple hard rollers and a sprint or two. I feel like sprint efforts increase TSS for the ride way too much. Today I had a sprint effort at the end of my ride. If I trim the last 2 minutes from today's 71 minute ride, the TSS is 90.7. But with the 15 second sprint and immediate cool down, the TSS jumped to an even 100.

Anyway, I don't feel fatigued generally but your posts and my subsequent thinking about them have me thinking I'm not doing enough easy riding. My challenge is that my typical week gives me 7 hours of riding so I feel pressure to make the most of it.

Currently CTL is 79. During season it hovers around 95, with a peak of around 105 last year before nationals.

95 isn't especially high for bike racing, though, and I do that on 12-14 hours a week. I train with guys that get well into the teens and 120s at points throughout the year at 20 and higher hours a week.

I'm in specific prep for IM Fortaleza, combined CTL (based on BikeScore/GOVSS/SwimScore but the scale is similar to TSS) floats around 160, composed of ~70 bike (avg IF~0.7) and ~45 (avg IF~0.8) for both swim and run.

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Ale Martinez
www.amtriathlon.com

Mine is hovering in the 90's for swim/bike/run. I look at them but I don't actually follow what they say religiously. I find them a good indicator of fitness in the bike, but not so much for run and definitely not for the swim. I think with a sport like swimming where there are far more variables to performance such as technique CTL starts to become just another input to consider. Case in point, is that I'm about 15 CTL lower on my swim at the same time as last year, but swimming about 7-9 sec/100m quicker.

Also the other reason I tend not to watch it religiously, is that I absolutely hate doing threshold tests, they suck. I can pretty much tell on the bike within 5-10 watts where my threshold is from some training workouts I have developed over the years, but run I tend to work off pace relative to HR and RPE. Swim I just go off RPE, working off three speeds. IM pace, Half IM pace, and as hard as I can. Hence it's tough for me to get an accurate threshold value and therefore an accurate CTL number.

I imagine (would love to see it) that IronCowboy's was probably in excess of 650 when he finished his 50.

I am in the first year of triathlon training and train +-600 hours per annum. My max CTL score is 229 so far but I think that can still increase in my attempt to qualify for the Ironman 70.3 world championship.
Hope this helps.

Suspect you have some incorrect settings for your threshold and pace values.

12 to 14hrs per week is likely around the 100-110 ctl if done right.

You've double the norm, in your first year.

Check your threshold settings.
Do you have any sessions that exceed 100tss for 1 hour?
This is the max possible if set correctly. And to score 100 for an hour requires 60mins of all out effort at threshold.

Thanks Jeff - did a quick research and seems you are right. I have workouts with higher than 100 tts per hour so probably something wrong. TP adjusts the thresholds regularly and when I train hard or race they are probably okay but not when I do recovery or easy work.
I have my lactate testing in the lab in 5 weeks so will be able to setup thresholds correctly.

My coach and I got mine up to 196 in the build for my last Ironman - I peaked at roughly 30 hours per week for that.

I got mine up to 151 this past summer but that was including 25hrs/week much of it in Florida heat. Definitely was happy when taper came around.

Holy cow, some insane numbers in this thread.

I'm a cyclist, do some running in the off season, around 22000 TSS on 400 hours per year, so it's around 60 avg all year long, peaking at 80, max 85. Whenever above that number, my body essentially shuts down and I can't perform anymore, so I do find it quite unbelievable seeing non-pro people ramping up to 120+ CTL values.

And, if anything, it would go down in the future since after 10 years of tracking all this stuff, I've slowly become a firm believer in 3 key principles:
* do most of your rides easy, but often (this is key)
* do some rides hard
* find time to rest

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Need more W/CdA.

Mine peaked at 129 a week ago, now tapering its at 120.

Been at around 1000 tss per week for the last couple of months.

Currently my CTL is 42. My highest was in the low 130’s during a big training block down in Colombia.

Sprint triathlete here, recently peaked at 71. I use a modified formula for figuring swimming TSS, though, which generally gives a lower score for a workout than TP would figure.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I calculate it myself in an Excel sheet with my workout data, so it may be off...........but only about 50 on average for my bike.

An overall average of about 50 gets me:

5 sec: 1200w
1 min: touch over 600w
2 min: 420w
5 min: 350w
20 min: now over 300, need to try a test soon at 320w
hour: done confirmed at 280w, but could have pushed more.......was just a SS workout, not a race or test

Running, ha! It's filler. Essentially just an hour or so every other week until fall/winter.
5k PR: 22min
mile PR: 6:20min

I'm more interested in run splits and bike power data based on these CTL's. That'd be interesting to pair up with the CTL.

Last year I peaked 130 before the last A-race of the season.
This year, of course, tried to topple it and peaked 136 early spring before the first A-race of the season. As a result, the whole summer was kinda meh.

If anything, this thread has taught me that CTL values vary wildly depending on the individual's threshold settings. I had thought people were only in the 100s right before an IM taper, or if they were doing 20+ hour weeks consistently.

I think it also depends on if a person is counting all Swim, Bike and Run training or combination of the three. (and their respective threshold values)

Currently at 136 and about 900-1100 TSS a week.

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