IMO you are the one doing quality miles. You did them all-out. He’s doing more miles but his miles include some that have less training value.
I used to think this way. I rode as hard as I could every day…yes I did get faster and did get fit…but strangely there is an easier way. Not every ride needs to be faster…do some longer slower rides and you will improve.
Lately I have been guilty of throwing in some all out sprints to eek the NP (and as a result TSS) up.
Also I’ve been really into load on intervals.icu for the week. Last summer (glory days) I was consistently in 500 but that’s quite hard to achieve as a true weekend warrior (and garage trainer) rider now that it’s winter
I was big time addicted in my early 20s. Now, I’d say I’m on the road to recovery with a few relapses from time to time!
I was getting 500 TSS each week as well. I’m in the LV plan and I’m feeling stretched at 250 TSS.
They say the LV is for time crunched people but to be honest, I can’t keep up with a mid-volume plan without getting overtrained. But I actually want 5 rides/week. I don’t like days off. I’m going to start doing easy days at least on Sunday and maybe Wed too. If it blows up my structured workouts, I’ll cut them out.
I ride brevets, long distance. I did one a week ago, 10 hours 56 mins ride time and 53 mins stop time.
The only screen I have showing on my gps is the map page , and my real time HR. I don’t even have the time showing. I have the HR showing as an assist to cap my efforts uphill where it may creep a little high. Pushing the HR too high on such long rides, and last week was the shorter end of the scale, has a disproportionate effect on the overall ride.
Having only HR showing and the map, no distance, no time, no average speed etc has a low cognitive load. It can be quite frustrating to any riders I find myself on the road with. They are stressing about whether they are going fast enough, when they’ll reach the next control point, how much climbing is left, how long a hill is, how far to the finish. I don’t worry about any of that. I take care of my effort, keeping it controlled, and know I’ll get to the next control or finish when I do.
Brevets are about elapsed time, which is made up of ride time and stopped time. You can have two riders with one riding 5 km/h faster, but the other (slower) rider finishes first as they are better at keeping their stops much shorter.
On events where the ride time in measured from tens of hours to days. Low cognitive load is good, else you start making poor decisions later on when fatigued. Too much information can lead to brain freeze over long durations. It’s those poor decisions during an event , that lead to poor outcomes.
Kind of a boring take. If you bought that watch with no real targets, it probably is pointless. Understanding how you feel and using numbers to measure that are not mutually exclusive. That seems so obvious I feel stupid saying it.
Ive not listened to the full podcast but the comment bullsh1t numbers made me think of this thread 
I chased numbers for a really long time, and it makes sense. We get into endurance sports, we learn about metrics, we learn more about metrics, we learn even more, and we correlate those to our performances. But with age and experience we soon realize that the signs our body tell us and our ACTUAL performance are what matter most. The data is great, but no platform (GC, WKO, Intervals.icu, INSCYD) is anywhere near perfect, and it only gets the RIDE data (some have sleep data and whoop, sure, but doesnt tell the whole story of life), so tapping into our communication is huge.
I love metrics, but am no longer a slave to them and my performance is better than it’s ever been! (GD can’t believe I’ll type “at age 40” also. Not used to that yet)
How much do you think the metrics focus is driven by rider-coach communication? I think it must often be beneficial for a coach to be able to look at an athlete’s data, but I feel for myself, I actually don’t learn much from the data that my body isn’t telling me anyway.
i think trends are important to catch and seeing where the power lies in terms of other workouts and past performance (not really a metric though), but they are definitely just a tool and not the bible. Ie my FTP is “down” 20W in WKO but it’s simply because I haven’t tested it; no need to, I know by feel where it’s at (part of that is having trained so long and can tell)…my coach is also not super into overly testing for the same reason.
I do think rider-coach comm can get overly focused on that, but if the metrics are “off” and they are riding well, that tells so much more of a story. End of the day, we are doing all of this for some type of performance goal; if we’re hitting it, then Awesome! If not, that’s when some changes or modifications should take place