Raising your Chronic Training Load (CTL) after a long layoff or injury is like turning around a battleship. While my collar bone heals, I've been hitting the trainer five or six days a week but it has only served to stop the decline in my CTL. Even Saturday's 70 mile ride -- my first outdoor ride since my injury five weeks ago -- raised the CTL only 4 points.
But this season I've learned the hard way not to increase the CTL too quickly -- look at the middle part of this chart and you can see a radical rise in my CTL over a 3-week period that ultimately lead to a bad case of knee tendonitis. You can also see a fall-off right afterwards due to the enforced layoff from the injury. After about 3 weeks, the CTL begins to rise again, this time at a rational rate as I gradually built up my training volume as the knee recovered. Everything was on track for a fantastic mid-season: until I broke the collarbone on May 26. After that the CTL drops preciptiously for about 4 weeks until the trainer rides halted the decline.
Now that I'm back out on the road, my goals are to prepare for cyclocross season by increasing my CTL gradually to approximately 80 points by mid-September, approximately 10 weeks from now. That is a very conservative ramp rate of 2.5 CTL points per week and implies a weekly TSS of 560 points. Let's see if I can stick to that!
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