Recently I’ve felt a drop off in ability and trying to work out if it’s simply a case of less time on the bike over winter period (+ a newborn mid Dec) contributing to a drop, or something else that can be easily spotted.
2019 was approx 6,000 km outdoors with around 110km of climbing + fairly regular turbo in off season. Outdoor activity dropped off towards end of the year as our winters are pretty cold but averaging around 300 tss/week on the turbo and I posted some power PBs on the turbo in Dec and early Jan.
I’ve attached some graphs showing: TSS history, power zone history and strava fitness and freshness curve. As you’d expect, you can see a peak over summer directly related to when I was spending a lot of time on the bike and dropping down to now. This correlates reasonably well to ability, although I’d say peak fitness was probably early 2019 or late 2019. I was not at my “fastest” in July when I had the highest training volume, reasonable I guess given stress factor.
Appreciate that it is fairly normal to see a drop over winter, but I’m still training reasonably hard on the turbo, albeit with less overall volume. I’m also comparing some of my segment times (always a bad idea) and they are not coming out favourably when compared against similar times in the calendar last year. Outdoor activity in 2020 has dropped a lot, primarily because of the baby factor i.e. 2 month gap between club rides in Jan to Feb and only 3 hill rep sessions (150 tss each) in that period to make up for the lack of outdoor activity.
Otherwise I’m healthy - any thoughts? Is this simply a case of winter blues and that volume is not enough? Or am I being punished for not strictly following a training plan (used TR in Nov and Dec)? Find these two options difficult to agree with as I am probably doing more (on the turbo anyway) than at any point previously.