I'm not entirely sure what my CTL is but I'm fairly certain it's less than 100.
In August I'm doing Lands End to John O'Groats in 2 weeks which will mean at least 4 hours on the bike per day for 14 days. Now even if you cycle for 4 hours at 40% of FTP (walking pace :p) you're still going to accumulate 160 TSS for two weeks. But it's low intensity so it's not really going to raise your FTP very much.
Does this mean that by the end of the two weeks I'll be technically overtrained? Last time I did it I felt better in the second week than the first. And after all that low intensity exercise would I be best spending the two weeks after the trip hammering some hard L4 and L5 intervals perhaps, with days off in between?
- 4 hours at 40% of FTP = 64 TSS, not 160 TSS....TSS = hours*100*IF^2
- CTL shouldn't really be viewed in isolation without regard to the intensity of the individual workouts. A ramp rate of 8 or more per week might be sustainable if it was all endurance riding although that would be an awful lot of endurance riding as demonstrated above.
- A single week of steep ramp rate typically isn't a problem but trying to sustain that for a few weeks can lead to trouble so two weeks might be pushing it but not necessarily
-Dave
Eldrack said:
I'm not entirely sure what my CTL is but I'm fairly certain it's less than 100.
In August I'm doing Lands End to John O'Groats in 2 weeks which will mean at least 4 hours on the bike per day for 14 days. Now even if you cycle for 4 hours at 40% of FTP (walking pace :p) you're still going to accumulate 160 TSS for two weeks. But it's low intensity so it's not really going to raise your FTP very much.
Does this mean that by the end of the two weeks I'll be technically overtrained? Last time I did it I felt better in the second week than the first. And after all that low intensity exercise would I be best spending the two weeks after the trip hammering some hard L4 and L5 intervals perhaps, with days off in between?
- 4 hours at 40% of FTP = 64 TSS, not 160 TSS....TSS = hours*100*IF^2
- CTL shouldn't really be viewed in isolation without regard to the intensity of the individual workouts. A ramp rate of 8 or more per week might be sustainable if it was all endurance riding although that would be an awful lot of endurance riding as demonstrated above.
- A single week of steep ramp rate typically isn't a problem but trying to sustain that for a few weeks can lead to trouble so two weeks might be pushing it but not necessarily
-Dave
Ahhh, rookie error. Forgot about the I^2 factor! That makes the whole thing a lot more reassuring :p. On that note 4 hours at 50% of FTP is only 100TSS, maneagable for two weeks I think. Second day is a bit of a beast though, 75 miles with 2000m of climbing.
You won't run into problem with overtraining by only riding 2 28 hour weeks, it will take much more than that. Your legs will just feel slightly fatigued each day.
You won't run into problem with overtraining by only riding 2 28 hour weeks, it will take much more than that. Your legs will just feel slightly fatigued each day.
Yeah, I think I'll be fine as long as we don't end up racing each other up every hill. That can get you very tired very quickly :p.
On the other hand there are going to be some fairly unfit/inexperienced cyclists in the group who could really suffer, especially on the long days so even if I'm feeling fairly fresh they could still be in serious pain.
I recently had a rider I coach go through a 30 point rise in CTL over 8 days, due to a late call up for a UCI ranked stage race they weren't originally training for.
He got through it, took a couple of weeks of recovery/transition (partly due to crash injuries) afterwards but was still alive and ready to go again 😉
For training camps then week long CTL rises of 10+ are not uncommon or all that much to be concerned about. It's trying to do that back to back for several weeks that will murder you.
