I purchased the book that gains the most kudos when looking to understand training with a power meter. The appropriately titled Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan. It is a full of good information and a worthy read.
I thought it would be good to look at my power profile with a hope that it would show an upward line from bottom left to top right. That is the profile a time trialist should have.
I then looked at my best power for 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minute and my FTP
The numbers converted to w/kg as follows
1 min 420 /85.7 = 4.90 (5.64 = 483)
5 min 323 /85.7 = 3.76
FTP 252 / 85.7 = 2.94
As always, there is good news and bad news. I cannot even get on the page for 5s and 1M but I do have the right shape for the other two. I have put in how many watts I need to get the lowest ranking for a man – and that makes me untrained. I could probably get my 5s a bit higher but I think 823 is probably unreachable and I am not even going to try.
I am also interested in following my TSS numbers as a means of managing weekly effort, rather than focussing on mileage. With having used the turbo exclusively for the last 3 months I wanted a good way of measuring the effort I have been putting in.
I did have a Excel spreadsheet where I have entered all my workouts since 1/1/16 and that gives me a current CTL of about 42. I then installed Golden Cheetah and imported all my files (which come from Strava as a mass download).
One problem I had was that the load would get stuck and hang, sometimes even on only a single file. I then realised that within the zip file from Strava were a lot of tcx files with 0 bytes. I deleted them and the mass upload went well.
My PMC chart for the last two months from Golden Cheetah is shown below
It is clear that I am growing my CTL – now at 31.5 and I am probably reasonably tired. I don’t understand why it starts at 0 but I didn’t do much through the summer. I want to get my CTL to over 50 before spring and I have no race planned until at least April so no concerns at the moment. Therefore I am just focussing on TSS for each week and trying to hit between 350 and 450 weekly. That should get easier as I am recovering from a broken wrist and should start to put in at least one outdoor ride a week shortly.
I have been watching a few GC videos on Youtube but I must admit I not familar with what all the charts mean.
sixtyplustimetrialling 
I’ve got that book too. I’ve read it couple of times and I recon I still understand less than half of it, haha! Very good info though and I’m sure it’ll keep getting clearer with each read. Same with GC, so many charts and data overload!
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