Yes, I would say my training volume has gone down. You can see my completely self-designed plan leading up to the end of December and then you can see where I started trying out TR’s interval plan. TR calculates my TSS for my personal training plan as ~300-400 per week and the TR training plan has me around 200-300 TSS per week (and I usually add in endurance rides for another ~100 points on those light weeks). I fed it my data and that’s what it suggested…and does it feel easier than what I was doing? Yes. Was part of my goal to avoid burnout or overtraining? Yes…I have had problems with that cyclically as I push too hard and then have big fall offs. But the goal wasn’t to just get weaker…I could have done that on my own!
My hope was that by moving to a different system I could train a little smarter, still maintain or improve fitness, and avoid burnout and overtraining. Maybe that’s just not realistic and if I want to continue to build into the >4 w/kg range as a 43-year-old cyclist. Maybe I need to constantly flirt with overtraining? Is that what this means?
