Do you both track swimming, cycling and running or just cycling? Mine got to about 120 tracking all three in the lead up to Ironman and I only averaged about 13-14 hours a week. Anyone peaking at 20+ hours per week could be looking at 150+.

126,9 @ IM in August.

Now @ 79,2

tracking all three

130 now, it peaked at 165 in august after a 12 hour bike race. I'm just a cyclist by the way.

This. And I'd add to that, what do you log?

I only log planned, structures workouts but I rack up an extra 10-12 hours a week commuting and running errands on the bike that I don't log. I always keep it easy but with each leg being 30 mins or less I just consider them junk miles. If I were to log those, I could probably add another 50+ points to my CTL.

I stay stuck around 96 throughout the year. I peak at 115 (when I actually follow a structured plan) only tracking run/bike and I'm only short course.

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@floathammerholdon | @partners_in_tri

I have stuck anywhere between 125 and 145 for the past nine months. Mostly higher intensity stuff on shorter time. Ill probably peak around 138 before my last IM of the season in a few weeks.

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New Training/Racing Log - http://www.earthdaykid.com/blog --- Old Training/Racing Log - http://colinlaughery.blogspot.com

A few years back I started looking at my TSS/hr (and in the process realized how inflated my old #s were by a poorly set FTP). At roughly 10hrs/week cycling, I average about 50 TSS/hr, which gives an average CTL of around 70 (50 TSS/hr*10/7 hrs/day). So for me to get a CTL of 125, I would need to be doing 2.5 hrs/day at 17.5 hrs/week while maintaining the same overall intensity. Is it possible to average more than 50 TSS/hr? Sure, but I'd suspect someone has their #s setup funny if they are way over that for high #s of hrs per week.

This should make you feel better: 66. I'm 3 weeks into cross season, so there's little volume right now. It's just race and recover. Was 86 before my first race. Never really goes much beyond 90...but I'm a single sport guy. I do run about an hour a week leading into CX season.

First of all, 50 TSS per hr is an IF of 0.707, which is classed as a recovery ride. It's no wonder you have to log massive hours to see any results at that intensity. I think it might be you that has your FTP wrong if you're seeing much benefit from that.

Secondly If you're running and especially swimming too, it's much easier (both physically and mentally) to log more TSS than just cycling alone; how often do you put in two bike workouts a day? I never do, but in-season, I do double-workouts of swim-run, swim-bike, bike-run 6 days a week and sometimes swim-bike-run too!

I train single sport as a cyclist and have fairly polarized workouts, so a 50 TSS/hr average isn't all IF of .707, in fact I avoid that type of riding almost entirely. If you are doing only SST workouts as a triathlete, sure you might average a bit more, but it isn't going to be a lot more. What kind of TSS/hr are you accumulating? In how many hours and with what types of workouts? On the one hand multi-sport does make it easier to log more hours at a higher intensity, but the flip side is that swimming and running TSS due to the lack of good data from a powermeter are harder to get accurate (and dare I say likely to be inflated).

I know its fun to come here and point fingers at who is wrong. It definitely could be me; the way I discovered how off my CTL and TSS/hr numbers were before was from ST, so I'm more than willing to learn. But in this case, I think you may want to reconsider who is wrong. Here is a pretty old link to another guy who "only" averages 50 TSS/hr: http://alex-cycle.blogspot.com/.../11/ctl-fitness.html If you aren't already familiar with his name/blog, I'd highly recommend it.

Yeah, I'm also a cyclist-only. CTL varies between ~60 and ~85 over the year. Also about 50 TSS/hr average. Also fairly polarized. I dose with threshold-or-above work in a pretty targeted, systematic manner. It doesn't take a lot of that kind of work to max out the stress a body can tolerate.

I tend to agree with you. I've been doing Trainer Road (steady state work) and have been surprised how many seemingly hard-ish rides (in terms of perceived effort) come in around 55-60 TSS per 60 minutes. Did an hour with 3x12 at 85% and another 4 at threshold this morning and it was only 63 TSS. You can get to 70 or 80 per ride on some of their rides but holy cow there is a lot of work in those (like 5x9 over/unders at 95/110% of FTP). I don't think anyone with a properly set FTP can do those every day.

Wondering about ATL and TSS score: At what point to alarm bells go off telling you you are over doing it.....which you probably feel in your sessions.

I hit 155.7 two weeks before Ironman Canada end of July. Had been building it gradually from 97 at mid-April. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to keep increasing it by just a few points per week using the numbers provided in TP. Had only two weeks over 20 hours (20.5 and 23).

I had heard about using CTL and TSB for years, but finally decided to use it and it was fantastic knowing those numbers and targeting them first, hours and miles a distant second. I highly recommend it, especially because it's built right in to TP already.

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Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

In The Real Coaching Podcast, Paulo has made a couple references to a study of rugby players (discussed here) suggesting that when ATL is >1.5x CTL an athlete is less resistant to injury. General in-workout fatigue should work in a similar way at a slightly lower multiple (i.e. it is relative target based on fitness rather than a static number).

Single sport (cycling). CTL peaked out this year at 62. I ride average about 8 hours a week stretching to 10 in the summer.

This was my first full year of tracking CTL. I'm going to shoot for higher next season now that I can see how this works. I do 2 pretty serious interval sessions a week but those ride are only 1-1.5 hours long and one or 2 group rides. I can't handle too much more intensity than I am doing (55 years old . . . .) but I could do more volume if I had more time. However, for the type of riding/racing I do (crits and 40-50 mile group rides), I'm not sure how much I will really benefit from just riding longer solely to drive up CTL.

This isn't right. Over the last year I averaged .78 IF on the bike, which is much higher than 50/HR

Maybe you're just not working hard enough :)

139.5 the day after IM Louisville.

129 today heading into Beach2Battleship

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Don't drown. Don't crash. Don't walk.

.78^2*100=61, so your .78 IF bike avg means 61 TSS/hr. That seems a little high to me, but not outrageous for multi-sport where presumably you are not doing lots of recovery rides and might not be doing as much polarized stuff (e.g. lots of SST like workouts).

Regarding the accuracy of my FTP and whether I'm working hard enough, I'm pretty comfortable with that. As I think you have seen from some follow up posters 50 TSS/hr is not unusual for a cyclist.

Those are just cycling #s

Yeah, I'll back you up again. I don't "get" the 120 numbers showing up here. I ride 13-15 hours per week . And that's 15 hours of true "roll time" meaning it's 20 hours or so of workout time, or around the most non-pros have time to do. 250-300 miles. Almost all over 200W except a few minutes easy-rolling between intervals and a couple of 1-hour recovery rides my coach sprinkles in and tells me not to exceed 200W. That has me at a CTL of 70 right now. If people were saying like "90" I might be getting CTL-envy. But 120 is just a silly number to me. Maybe it's legit for a triathlete, but utterly unattainable for me without quitting my job.

Where do you find this info? Do you have to be a paid user?

Word of caution about CTL, a few of them actually.

It requires you to have an accurate threshold run pace/FTP set. Many (most) triathletes that I talk to have a close enough pace.
There is no research that I'm aware of that shows 1 unit of running CTL = 1 unit of cycling CTL. If could be -1 or 4 or 8 or -9.

Hopefully that raises some questions for you to ponder and gives you some ideas on how to use CTL

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

They're talking about a combined swim + bike + run. It's easy to rack up 120... my max was 139 during an IM block. However bike CTL, swim CTL and run CTL are not equivalent so tracking them combined is meaningless in my opinion unless someone comes up with a conversion factor or something.