The Power Meter Handbook: A User’s Guide for Cyclists and Triathletes

racelike intensity is maintained. (I explain the process of peaking in greater detail in my books The Cyclist’s Training Bible, The Triathlete’s Training Bible, and The Mountain Biker’s Training Bible.) The ultimate goal of peaking is to come into “form” on race day. You’ve undoubtedly heard this term used before by athletes and perhaps by sports commentators on TV. They refer to being “on form.” No one ever explains what this means, however, because, I expect, few really understand it. Being on form is not simply possessing high fitness, although that’s part of it. I’ll explain.
    The term “form” is thought to have originated with the popularity of horse racing in Europe in the late 1800s. If you went to the racetrack and wanted to bet on a horse, you would go to a bookie (a betting agent). He would have a sheet of paper with a list of all of the horses in the race, their odds of winning, and a brief summary of how they had been racing recently. You would pick a horse to bet on from this information because it looked good “on the form”—the sheet of paper. This eventually became “on form.”
    Bike racing, which was coming into prominence at about this same time, adopted this term since there was also betting at these races. It stuck, and so for well over a century cyclists have referred to being on form. In recent years, other sports have adopted the term, so it’s used across a broad spectrum of activities from cycling to running to golf and more—including mountain biking and triathlon.
    But if on form doesn’t mean just being fit, what does it mean in the context of racing? What it really means is that the athlete is race ready. Being race ready indicates that fitness is high and, more importantly, that the athlete is fresh—rested. We already know about fitness, which is CTL on the Performance Management Chart. So how do we measure freshness? We can answer that by better understanding the process of tapering and peaking.
    As mentioned earlier, when you taper, you reduce your daily TSS (workload) while including some brief, racelike workouts. Remember from our discussion earlier what happens when you reduce TSS: You lose fitness. Still okay with that? Perhaps not? Most athletes believe that when they taper, they gain fitness. However, you can’t reduce TSS and gain fitness. It just doesn’t work that way. If stress is reduced, fitness begins to fade away. If doing less training were the key to fitness, you would sit in front of the TV to get fitter.
    When fitness (CTL) decreases, what happens to fatigue (ATL)? Well, remember that they trend in the same directions, but they do so at differentmagnitudes. So tapering will also cause a loss of fatigue. That’s not a bad thing; cutting fatigue means that you become fresher. And that’s the payoff: When you cut back on TSS, you gain freshness—you come into form. You must reduce TSS even though it will also cause a loss of fitness. But that’s okay. This conundrum is resolved by the other unique dimension of fitness: It decreases at a slower rate than does fatigue.
    If you are careful with your training, you can reduce fatigue a lot over the course of a couple of weeks while decreasing fitness only a little. Time it right and you will be on form by race day. You’ll race better if you have given up a lot of fatigue even though you’ve lost a little fitness along the way. A highly fit but tired athlete doesn’t perform as well as slightly less fit but well-rested athlete. Fatigue is more powerful than fitness. It must be eliminated even if that means giving up a little fitness.
    Another way of expressing this relationship among fitness (CTL), fatigue (ATL), and form during tapering is to say that we are focused on subtracting fatigue. When we think of it this way, the formula for form becomes
Fitness (CTL) – Fatigue (ATL) = Form
    Again, we only want to lose a little fitness while shedding a lot of fatigue in order to come into form. It’s a careful balance we’re trying to achieve between CTL and ATL. With this balance between CTL and ATL in mind, form is referred to in the Performance Management Chart as “Training Stress Balance” (TSB). That’s another fancy term, so I’ll continue to call it form except when discussing the numerical data point it represents on the chart.
    Figure 7.4 adds form (TSB) to the athlete’s fitness (CTL) and fatigue (ATL) from the two previous figures. Every day the TSB data point was