I've always been slightly suspicious of TSS - not that it wasn't a useful heuristic, but that it could be very easily "gamed" such that you could rack up high TSS work while not actually putting yourself under that much stress. One of the failures of TSS as I see it is that it counts time at an intensity level the same whether it's sustained or not, that is one 8-minute effort at 110% FTP counts the same as eight 1-minute efforts at 110% FTP; while the first one would be very hard the second is basically a breeze. Saw this very much in effect with my last three workouts; first the TSS charts: As you can see - the TSS for the "Polarized" workout is the highest of the three, but from a perceived effort sense (as well as a muscle recovery sense) it wasn't all that harder than the "Goodale" workout, and it was MUCH easier than the "Floats" workout (which is a doozy for me). In my quest to find a better way to measure this actual difficulty / impact, along came Xert. If you view the same three workouts in their analysis software, you can see that both the Strain and XSS are about 10% higher for the "Floats" workout than the "Polarized" workout, due to the extended continuous time time spent at that higher intensity vs the smaller sprints. It took me some time to get used to the Xert way of measuring the workouts vs classic TSS, but it's really reassuring to see the metrics now lining up with the perceived exertion, such that I no longer feel like I'm cheating the system.
Moral of the story; if it feels too good to be true (all that TSS for not so much exertion), then it probably is...
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I've long since accepted that, while I love the concept of being a professional mountain biker, the idea of balancing that with a successful career are downright impossible - so have settled for the idea that I'd like to get my USA Cycling Pro MTB license, race in some national championships, etc. My goal is the level of "serious amateur", treating this sport with a huge level of discipline and focus, but being realistic about what I can look to accomplish given my myriad other constraints.
So - with that in mind, what does 2018 look like? While I'd love to make that upgrade from Cat 1 to Pro, I think that might be a year off, so shooting for 2018 to be the year I:
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