Click the image above to see it a little larger...

I was looking at this today... it is really an awesome thing to look back over your year of cycling. A lot of sweat and pain goes into racing a bike and it is rare that you can sit back and view it on one graph... thank God for power meters. I am going to jot down the first thoughts that come to mind when I look at this... no particular order and most of them will come off as inconsequential ramblings... either way, thank God for the power meter...

First some definitions...
FTP- my threshold power for an hour. This is the max wattage output I can put out over an hour time. I measure this often and it is the backbone of my entire training plan.
NP- normalized power- this is average power, but with a twist. Basically, the peaks and valleys the ride are factored in less and it gives a better approximation of the true stress on your body.
TSS- total stress score- this is a stress score that is assigned to each ride. An all out 1 hour effort at FTP receives a score of 100.
CTL- chronic training load- this is basically a measure of how hard I am riding overall for the past while... it is pulling from a 45 day rolling average of workouts to determine a chronic load of training. To quote from elsewhere... FTP is how fast you can go... CTL is how long you can go fast.
TSB- Training Stress Balance- this takes into account your ATL- acute training load (the past 5-7 days of workouts) and compares your current short term load to your chronic load (long term load) to give you a stress balance. The numbers are irrelevant other than a positive TSB means I am rested and a negative means I am tired. A +10 is usually good for racing...

• My first workout with my power meter was a 5 hour ride on 7-28-07... it came up as a 376 TSS workout... wow... what a beast. I don't remember what this was, but it must have been tough.
• I took two weeks off in October... I did not want my CTL to drop too far... looks like it went from some where around 77 to around 63... not too bad
• My ramp over the winter was around 4 CTL points per week... I started to push up on that number and got over 90 on CTL and got injured... not saying that the increase caused it but who knows...
• I level off for the anaerobic part of the winter training program
• I break my hip
• I had not looked at this since I broke my hip.
• All of the belly aching about not getting my form back... look at this graph... my CTL did not start an upward movement for almost two months and that CTL is lower than number I have had in a year... even lower for way longer than last years offseason.
• I am proud that I toughed out those rides when I was still on my crutches and a cane... it made my comeback better than if I would have been sitting on my tail for 2 months...
• My ramp coming back was steeper than my ramp last winter... I did not notice it while it was happening... I was just happy to be back riding...
• The month of July sucked...
• Look at the last ramp at the far right... I am coming back, but this time with my anaerobic system along with me...
• I love cycling