I can't speak to the free membership. I've been a premium member since last century, when it was called trainingbible.com.

Are you a multi-sport athlete? Do you swim (and use a watch to record it)?

TP sucks for swimming. I mean REALLY sucks.

Hijacking the thread here, but SportTracks.mobi has the best swim tracking I have found. I mean awesome. I pay the Premium (USAT discounted) rate for TrainingPeaks, use it for planning my seasons, tracking TSS, all the geeky bits. But TP and Strava are both useless for swim workouts. Garmin is good, but if you're dropping Garmin then SportTracks is your answer. The only problem with it is my splits are never faster in SportTracks than anywhere else. But I keep wishing.

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I'm closer to the feathered end of the spear than the point.

Yep, triathlete through and through. It seems to give me basically nothing but the time and not even a tss for swim.

On the flip side Coros which is who I’d be switching to does give a swolf. I just want something that I can view in a desk top. I don’t know who we’ll coros recording data is. Everyone who’s used it loves the devices. They also export directly to TP.

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

I think if you are using the free version, TP has a lot of overlap with Strava in terms of what it offers. (minus the social side of strava)

I use the paid membership, and where it really earns its salt is with a coach or trainingplan. This allows me to plan my periodization, and I after a good race, I look back at the 90 days leading up and compare that to the 90 days before a meh race to see if I can figure out what's helping.

I'm not sure on how to use the TSS though to be honest. In the past, when I did my own workouts, my TSS avg was around 165. That level of training got me to 3 KQ Ironmans. Looking back, lots of grey zone and what some would call junk miles, but I call fun. I do really like to just get outside and swim bike and run without making it all about race results. I am very much the type of person that I race pretty well because I love to train; I don't train to race. That said, if I want to try to get better (cracked 10hours once at IMSA and stalled there for two years, I know I need to change so I have.

Now I am using a plan from D3 and there is obviously a lot more structure and actual knowledge in the planning! But...with the plan, my TSS hovers around 125. I'm obviously fresher and doing some new workouts that are a LOT harder than what I did, but I'm also having lots of easy days too. (which is why I got the plan...I get it, it makes sense!) So I'm not "worried" that my TSS is lower than it was in terms of how well prepared I will be for race day. And I get it from a quantitative perspective what TSS means. What I'm curious about and would love an explanation is how to use it. e.g. if I end up racing faster with a rolling TSS of 125 vs 165, how do I use TSS in my planning? More is not better, but then...?

Yeah the more I think about it the more I think TSS is somewhat worthless. The thing I do like about it is it seems to quantify an equivalence from sport to sport. With that said bike miles are bike miles and run miles are run miles.

I’m not a data Junkie although I will take a gander at what I’m doing well and what I’m doing not so well and need to practice. I’m mostly looking for a long term and easy to use platform that downloads automatically. But would like to know what’s offered since it seems to go rather in depth.

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

1 sTSS, 1 rTSS, and 1 TSS are not equivalent. This is why tracking overall TSS can be misleading (along with overall CTL). If one wants to track TSS, it's best to track individual sports TSS.

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blog

Somebody mentioned Final Surge to me when I was looking at getting TP. I downloaded the free app, linked my Strava (so pretty much any GPS works) and off I went.

I like the user interface, ability to save workouts for future planning and ability to see power zones and running zones. 2 months in I’m happy, we’ll see if that continues as my volume increases.

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How good is it at tracking trends in power zones over time?

Like, can I plot a trend of 1min power over a year? Then do same for 5 and 20min power?

My TSS I track in a spreadsheet and calculate TSB etc... Usually though it’s not useful as I just fit in as much as I can being short on time.

Thus, TSS is an output and not an input.

The tracking power trends would be nice.

Is there a way to quickly upload your entire history or am I in for a long bit of frustrating computer crap?

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

Wattsboard does that, not sure about TP

Thanks for that. I'll check that out!

Also, I've never bought TP because I'm not a firm believer in their CTL guidelines or the overall theory. My CTL you'd think I'm some kind of B-group riding punter.

When in reality I can really really hurt the folks on the local hammer rides. Not just for 20 minutes either, even on the longer 60mi rides.

Tossinga 5.5w/kg max for 3 minutes and having an eternal CTL of low 40's doesn't seem to jive whatsoever.

That's why I'm more interested in just knowing my power in each zone, tossing a % at the intervals, doing them, and keeping a good eye on my power/duration numbers plotted over weeks, months, year.

CTL is not a measure of fitness, its a measure of sustainable training load which is why it scales with your FTP. Not sure where you are getting the impression that CTL lets you compare yourself to other's performances. Plenty of time crunched guys with low CTLs crushing out there

That’s good to know . I worked hard to bring mine up to 115, even at sprint distance racing, yet I was slower than I was when I was in the 60’s. I gave up worrying too much about ctl. I thi k form can be misleading too