Help my PMC went whacky

scott dinhofer

As I draw a line in the sand and say it's time to get focused on Louisville in 9 weeks, I look at my PMC and somehow it shows me scratching at 140. The rub is that a few days ago I was at 117. 

when I look back, it now shows me as
peaking in the 170s before Lake Placid (when I know I peaked at 153)
shows that I passed 140 CTL on 5/26 which I know I did not do until a week or so later in al camp

so what changed?
I am assuming to get a bigger CTL on the chart, that is driven completely by TSS. So the rub is that somehow something changed in either the total TSS of a wko or the inputs (SB&R paces) were lowered somewhere along the way

Fortunately i have a snapshot of my chart from my LP Race Plan & one yesterday, a month apart, if you are good, you will see the differences, particularly right before BRC. That is where it looks like the entire chart moved up. I am wondering if an extra WKO or two got in there, etc. Is there a way of seeing a log of all edits, changes, etc to a TP account?

I am somewhat of a neophyte on TP and could use some help in what to do before I really start messing with the TSS by re-entering thresholds for certain time periods.. 

thanks in advance

Jenn Edwards

Hey Scott,

Oh man, when your pretty graph wonkey that's no bueno!  There are lots of things that could jack it up, troubleshooting step #1, IMO is to create individual PMCs for each sport: swim, bike and run.  Hopefully that will make it more clear which sport (if it's just one) is cranky-pants.   This is actually a very good practice year-round.  Although the whole PMC is really pretty, when it comes down to brass tacks, it does not provide insight on what to do or NOT do for S/B/R because it isn't obvious what's driving the beautiful blue line.  Also consider having a fourth PMC that is bike and run so you can see the abuse your legs are taking.

Secondly, take a close look at your swim TSS.  In the big picture it should be coming in at around 20 TSS points per 1,000 yards.  I manually input that flat rate for each swim because swim TSS is so unreliable. For the purposes of cleaning up your PMC, you don't need to go back and do so but if it's waaayyy outside of that range, the swim could be your culprit.  Unless you're swimming with Michael Phelps daily, of course.

I'm happy to continue to troubleshoot with ya - keep us posted.

Cheers! -Jenn

Paul Curtin

That's wonky for sure.  There's an option in the PMC settings to recalculate and backfill previous TSS values ... did something get adjusted on that screen?  From the PMC Chart page, open the PMC settings box:


Then click on the "Recalculate TSS" button, and see if anything looks out of line.  This option does a bulk update of previous TSS values for the date range chosen.

If that doesn't show anything, try looking at the PMC trend over several years.  Is everything consistent or is just this year skewed.  Also look at individual workouts from this year compared to previous years; for example how many TSS points were scored from a 5-mile tempo run this year vs. last year

Brian Hagan

@Jenn Edwards - Not to hijack this, but I love charts as well.  I am interested in your reasoning for 20 TSS per 1000 yds.  I am just wondering if you came up with that or of someone gave you that guidance.  I've tried tricking it by entering my t-pace at 1:30 (much faster than actual), but it still gives me too much (in my opinion).

@scott dinhofer my first thought is that you had a taper week fall off the 6 week horizon, but I assume you had one or 2 recovery weeks in there as well.  There has got to be a wko or 2 giving you too much TSS.  I'd check your threshold settings as well.  

John Culberson

@Scott Dinhofer- Agree with @Jenn Edwardsthat individual ramp rates may help isolate the error. I also retreated to the 20TSS/1000yd rule after realizing that I was getting too much credit for swimming. Most (including myself) tend to really ramp the swimming as race day approaches. The good news there is that, while your numbers are crazy, your race preparation is solid.

scott dinhofer

welll..... thanks all for the answers.. this was something that happened over the weekend. Fortunately I had breakfast today with my friend and total tri-data geek, Jordan Rapp... We figured it out pretty quickly. 

My daughter plugged her garmin into my laptop this weekend as she was having issues on hers. I got 20 miles per week running at a slow pace for the last 5 months added to my garmin/Strava/Trainingpeaks in one shot... 

went through and deleted all the bad workouts in all three...

Jordan troubleshooted it much the way that @Jenn Edwards did, made separate chart for S, B & R, saw that R was the culprit and starting looking at days with multiple runs... the maps told all (as did the paces), my inclination originally was to look at what @paul curtin suggests above. 

btw, HUGE learning experience seeing how a trained engineer and pro triathlete uses his own TP setup..

thanks all for taking the time! 

scott dinhofer

Brian Hagan said:

@Jenn Edwards - Not to hijack this, but I love charts as well.  I am interested in your reasoning for 20 TSS per 1000 yds.  I am just wondering if you came up with that or of someone gave you that guidance.  I've tried tricking it by entering my t-pace at 1:30 (much faster than actual), but it still gives me too much (in my opinion).

@scott dinhofer my first thought is that you had a taper week fall off the 6 week horizon, but I assume you had one or 2 recovery weeks in there as well.  There has got to be a wko or 2 giving you too much TSS.  I'd check your threshold settings as well.  

btw, everyone is of the mind that one thing that TP doesn't do well is swimming... 

Jordan uses a separate chart for all three sports, plus a combo BR & combo SBR
he also never changes his inputs over the last 9 years. He looks for the gains on the chart as a combination of more work and more strength.. though for him the strength barely changes.
One of the other takeaways was his comment about what his peak CTL was for the events he did best in, hint they were not his biggest numbers. 

jimmy augustine

@Scott Dinhofer I'm just showing up to this thread now and I would really like to hear more about what rapp said regarding CTL at his best result events.

scott dinhofer

comment above basically said it all, consistency of training beat out intensity or final push of training was the takeaway.. He's had his worst performances off of the highest of CTLs