Hello,
Today my workout was to do several top rope solo laps of drytooling for practice. It involved a short hike, setting up the top rope, doing 4 laps (only breaks were transitioning from climbing to rapelling to climbing again), then hike out. Each lap was about 15′ of climbing except the last was 10′. I wore my heart rate monitor – a christmas gift I’m still learning to use – and have just started tracking my training with Training Peaks, so learning how to score climbing session.
My question is to how to score this kind of working in Training Peaks TSS. Overall, it was 3 hours 25 minutes car to car, but much of that time is not particularly active (getting setup, transitions, etc.). Training Peaks gives a hrTSS of 178 for the whole time. However, when I break up the workout into the “active” sections (about 40′ of hiking, 55′ of climbing), then the calculated TSS score comes in at 96 or so (call it 100).
My instinct is to go with the TSS of 100 since that feels about right for the level of perceived effort and 178 seems excessive. This also seems in line with guidance from this article which would score 80-100 TSS for “ARC” at near limit (this wasn’t really an ARC session, but the burns were long and I suck at drytooling so it felt hard for me!) https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/trainingpeaks-metrics-ctl-tss/
OR: Should I NOT go with the heart rate calculated TSS for climbing at all, and just go with the guidelines of the article linked above? It seems like it might be useful for long burns vs. boulder or short sport routes where heart rate is kind of a meaningless gauge. If I were to go with those guidelines, it would be about 35 TSS for the hiking session + 80 for the climbing = 115 TSS.
Similarly, I’m wondering how others track and score actual alpine climbs, where there are long break periods at belays, though often those belays aren’t exactly fully restful either. Do you use the total TSS for the whole outing? Or break it into the active segments?
Thanks!
