I definitely don’t. This last one (March 31) was the first time where I even considered doing some other sort of physical activity. Surprisingly, I had the legs to take my daughter for a ride in the Burley on a hilly route around a local lake. It was a super low intensity ride, even with the added weight of a trailer and toddler, but a short workout immediately following a ramp test has never felt possible.
This question really resonates, and I think it might be something for me to keep a closer eye on. I’ve been going back through the workouts from the last few training blocks, and I’m seeing a pattern in the charts and notes…
Starting with Base 2, I can consistently complete the Tuesday workout without issue, in the 4th week the Thursday workout starts to become hit or miss on whether I complete it as planned (time or intensity). The 5th week (last intense week) I shifted the workouts to Wednesday, Friday, Sunday to get an extra day of rest, completed without issue, then couldn’t complete Petit and Beech as planned because my legs just had nothing to give.
Next was Build (destroyed after this ramp test for a couple of days), and during the first block of build I struggled to complete everything as planned. I’d chalked it up to the workouts looking more like sustained, high level output, which has never been a strength (I’m now doing what I should’ve started doing 20 years ago, and trained this weakness), but maybe it is just accumulating fatigue. Great observation, and good food for thought.
I think I need to explore this approach. This might be exactly what I did, get an unrealistic FTP value upon which the workouts were then based, which made them unattainable. Thankfully I saw a slight drop in FTP after the last test, so maybe this block will be a bit more achievable.