This is my own Performance Management Chart – charting my fitness, fatigue and “form” as I train for IMSG in 3.5 weeks. I do this for all of my athletes that upload accurately calibrated workout files from Powertaps, Garmins, certain Polars, etc. Mine is even more complete because I put in estimates for my swims and strength workouts as well.
There is a lot to learn about these charts, but here are some key points.
• The blue line tracks “fitness” and is based on the training stress from workouts over the last six weeks (for most people).
• The pink line tracks “fatigue” and is based on the training stress of the last week - as compared to my recent, typical training load.
• The yellow line tracks “form” or my potential to have great legs in a race if it should occur today.
As you can see, I’ve had a very consistent training season. I started with a week of cross country skiing followed by a week of bronchitis (go figure!) back in early January. But after that, I had six weeks of hard training leading – building my blue line and feeling very fatigued.
Then, you can see my taper for the Birkie – a wonderful week of rest that I needed both to race well at the Birkie but also to recover from my training in February (where I was training for skiing plus Ironman). Take a close look at that Birkie/taper week. You can see how it is necessary to lose fitness during a taper. But the benefits are greatly decreased fatigue and greatly enhanced form. (Important: if you schedule too many races during peak training season – your overall fitness will not build and your “A” race will suffer later in the season.) And finally, you can see the little bump up in fitness and fatigue from the race itself.
Then, I trained hard again for 2.5 weeks and rested a little leading up to the Half Marathon. (Not nearly a taper – just a little less volume. You can see clearly that I went into that race quite fatigued – but it was a training race – not important to me. I wanted the fitness building from it.
I then had my biggest volume training week and then last week was a little less volume.
Right now, I feel extremely fatigued and my graph shows it. But the good news is that my fitness is very high as well. My blue line has hit the 117 mark this week. I’ve got about ten more days to get my blue line up above the 120 mark. This has been where I’ve gotten in training for my two best Ironman races (I’ve got my charts from four out of five of my IM races). I’ve got the historical data to back up my plan and I know this fitness is about as high as I can handle.
So what does a blue line of 120 TSS/d mean? It means that I’ve averaged a training stress score of 120 per day over the last six weeks. To put that in perspective, a TSS score of 100 means that you have raced all out for an hour. If you were to do a 40km TT, you’d have a score of 100 for the day. I’ve averaged more than 100 by doing multiple workouts and some long, breakthrough workouts each week.
So, after I’ve reached my fitness high point, it will be time to taper. At that time, I must manage to lose fatigue without losing too much fitness – a tricky but fun part of my job as a coach. All the training in the world will not help an athlete who arrives at the starting line too fatigued to race well!
Coaching and training are an art and a science. This is more science. The art side is even more important. More on that later.
