I love data. This is no surprise to anyone that reads this blog or knows me. I’m sure I over-analyze things, but I also believe that you can more easily improve performance when you track it. I enter every workout on a website called Training Peaks. By uploading all of the data from my Garmin watch, Training Peaks compiles the data into a Performance Management Chart (PMC). At the end of each season, I like to look back at my season on the PMC – to see how my fitness improved over the season and to see if I was able to peak at the right times.

You can see my 2013 PMC below.

You’ll first notice three lines. There is a blue line which represents Chronic Training Load (CTL), a pink line represents Acute Training Load (ATL) and the yellow line represent Training Stress Balance (TSB). In order to simplify things, I just remember that the blue line represents your fitness, the pink line shows your fatigue, and the yellow line shows how fresh/rested you are. The goal is to have the blue and yellow lines increase and the pink line decrease leading up to your “A” race. I read somewhere once that your TSB (yellow line) should be +15 to +22 leading up to the race.

You can see that my fitness what steadily improving from December unit around the end of March. This is when I had an arch injury caused by switching shoes. I took the next four weeks off from running and only did a few aqua-jogging sessions. Despite still logging some hard-core trainer sessions on the bike, I lost some fitness. But it may have been a blessing in disguise as you can see that my fatigue (pink line) went down and my freshness (yellow) went up during this period.

After I got back to running, my fitness came back really quickly as I went into June. My fitness continued to improve all the way up to my two week taper leading up to Ironman Louisville at the end of August. This is exactly how I wanted things to go. The chart shows my fitness lowering leading up to the race, but more importantly, my fatigue lowered and I was very fresh on race day. The small loss of fitness was not a factor on race day, but coming in with high fatigue would have been a disaster!

This chart shows the last 12 months….including the four months following Ironman (aka my Off-Season). This is what an off-season should look like. Fitness is suffering, but my body is recovering and will be ready to go come January.

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