It's the TSB, stupid

I last posted wondering why my performance had improved in the last month and provided a few possible theories. Then I received a comment on my post from Stuart Lynn (http://tt-training.blogspot.com/). He suggested that the increases in performance may be due to a positive Total Stress Balance (TSB). One glance at my TSB trend over the summer (see my recent "2007 Training Load" post) almost proves that he's right. My TSB hovered around or below zero from March to mid-August, but has been between 5 and 15 for much of late August and September. That's mainly due to the ATL/CTL spike I got at RAGBRAI.

If I put any faith in Andrew Coggan's Performance Manger, then the the obvious answer is that the RAGBRAI effort has indeed paid dividends 4 to 8 weeks later. That means I'm crazy if I don't try to repeat that type of effort a few times a year at the appropriate times.

Thanks, Stuart, for helping me to see the obvious.