City riding – where you’re expected to keep up with motor vehicle traffic – is extremely hard on the body, especially when you factor in that you probably didn’t have a warm-up beforehand. Accelerating to keep near someone’s bumper can easily get you up to double your VO2max level wattage (or more), over and over again. It’s stressful and hard on the joints. Just because it was ‘only’ 18 minutes doesn’t mean it couldn’t have wrecked you. That’s the sort of thing that might make me re-think the next day’s workout.
I’ve taken to paying attention to my PMC in intervals.icu, and I think it helps keep me from getting in over my head. I have concluded that I’m not experienced enough to just ‘feel’ when the fatigue is starting to become overwhelming.
Two things I’ve done to be long term successful with TR using MV and moving up the HV plans.
Make all Sunday workouts longer z2 achievable rides. A fourth day of intensity IMHO is poor programming and is one of TR’s biggest faults. Yes it’s doable but walks a fine line of being too much and is more likely to lead to non-functional overreaching.
Make all “recovery” days feel like Recovery! If you look at the recovery day and think it looks even the slightest bit more than you want, use Alternates to find something easier. Also, during the workout if you feel more tension on the legs then you’d prefer, turn down the intensity 5+%.
AT has improved TR plans but you are still your own coach and need/must adjust as you see fit.
I was doing mid volume from late September through to just after New Years, and just found the 4 days of intensity too much with my other commitments. I was failing or really struggling with the threshold workouts despite being confident my FTP wasn’t overestimated. Dropped to LV and started padding other days with Z2/Z3 and I’m feeling so much better on the hard days. Over unders (at a higher FTP than when I was failing workouts) are uncomfortable but manageable.
Thanks everyone. I needed to take some time out from dwelling on it as well as time out from intensity so I let the thread sit for a few weeks whilst I recalibrated. There were a couple really good discussions on the podcast about this kind of thing over those weeks too, so I turned my planning/analysis attention there.
I did attempt my next Tuesday VO2 workout but I wouldn’t have expected to be able to complete it even if I was still pinging - it was another of those instances where I think AT was trying to find out where my limit was, so the progression increase was surprisingly ambitious. Was glad I tried it and I performed about as expected, which was a pretty decent effort. I knew I shouldn’t have done it but just couldn’t help myself and was pleased to get one last glimpse at where I was before taking my recovery time.
After that I swapped out the rest of my workouts with duplicates of the upcoming recovery week, so I did something like 1.75 weeks of recovery/aerobic riding. I think it was actually a bit too long as I’ve come into this first week ‘back’ pretty flat - had to backpedal 3 of the 9 ‘overs’ in an Achievable over-under workout yesterday but I think that’s just from being out of practice (gave up in my head long before my legs/lungs were actually at their limit). I expect I’ll feel on the up again next week, and if I don’t then I’ll know I needed more time off, not less.
Had to look this one up as I’ve never tracked it before, but you’re correct - at least based on looking at about a month’s worth of Wednesday endurance workouts in TrainingPeaks. Is it useful to keep an eye on this in future? I think I’d probably have to watch it for a good few months before I started to get a real sense of what it means for me as an individual.
Exactly - easy to see that now with a bit of distance and recovery behind me. Thanks Mark!
Hindsight and all that. When I first started AT in the autumn I was really impatient with it not challenging me fast enough but resisted the temptation to manually sub in harder workouts. With this recent episode I’ve now seen the other end of it so I feel a lot more confident making manual edits (in both directions) to AT’s decisions going forward.
I used to watch this in TrainingPeaks as my primary method of monitoring fatigue (before I started TR). I do still check occasionally but since I’ve been on TR it doesn’t really correlate to my experience at all like it used to. At the time I started this thread there was nothing on that graph that would have raised any red flags.
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Yes I think some combination of these are going to be the trick going forward. I’ve already started swapping my Wednesdays down and I think I’m going to shake up my weekends a fair bit.
I just had a dig through my TrainingPeaks history and it looks like at the times where I made the most progress I was really only consistently doing 2 intense interval sessions a week. Occasionally a 3rd if weather was bad or I was really focused on a particular goal, but mostly I skipped my weekend intervals to do more fun rides. I was doing way more volume (unstructured) though - looks like weekends were about a 5-8hr and a 2-4hr ride if I average it out (both steady but unstructured). OR sometimes it was just a couple of 2-3hr rides with one steady and one having some intensity (race simulation group ride, chasing PRs on a few 15+ minute segments/climbs, or occasional intervals).
I enjoyed cycling a lot more and grew my FTP consistently during those periods. I especially liked the bump I’d get after ramping my long rides up to some kind of monster 8-12hr effort and then recovering for a couple weeks. There were a few problems with that though:
It takes me two weeks to recover from an effort like that so can’t really do it regularly.
I was only able to handle that level of time commitment (and probably the associated recovery) because it was during or surrounding various lockdowns over the last couple years.
That kind of fitness meant I could ride most people in my w/kg category off my wheel easily after about hour 5, but I just couldn’t hang onto punchy efforts in shorter events. Fantastic with my A-races being gravel/bikepacking, but made it very hard to start dipping my toe in the crit/road racing waters.
When I joined TR and AT I decided to sacrifice most of the outdoor freeriding partly to get some time back for other life things, partly to try to re-shape my fitness to be more suitable for shorter events, and partly because I thought I needed more structure to progress beyond my 4w/kg peak in future. But now here I am instead burning out on roughly 2/3 volume and half the TSS I thrived on before.
Obviously there’s something physiological about those really long rides that I’m missing, but I don’t think it’s just training stress. I think there’s also some unquantifiable alchemy in what those rides do to my weekly rhythms in terms of both nutrition and psychology which was obviously more important to my progress than I understood. Even the handful of times this winter where weather’s been good enough that I went to my Sunday club run I found myself feeling stronger that Tuesday than my fatigue stats would indicate (and notably this only happened after a club run but not when I did my SS intervals outdoors). And, as @DarthShivious noted really well, the enjoyment of that kind of riding is why I got into all this in the first place, so I need to remember that fitness gains start to lose their shine if I suck all the joy out of the sport in the process. That’s not to say there’s no point in sacrifice/discipline, but like all things it’s about balance.
So I think I’m going to start blowing off my weekend workouts and just go back to my very general ‘one day hard, one day steady’ guideline and otherwise follow my nose. Terrible weekend to start that here in Scotland with a forecast so blowy it might not even be possible to keep a bike upright, but I guess that’s why I’ll always have the TR workouts there as backups (or Zwift racing, etc. given that I still haven’t got round to cancelling that subscription). And I’ve got a work/holiday trip to California in a week’s time, so that’s plenty of motivation to make a return to unstructured outdoor riding!
I’m sure I’ve set some kind of word count record now so I’m nearly done. One question for anyone still reading - if I’m only doing two interval sessions a week, do I want to do Tu/Th, or should I be grabbing the Saturday workout and sticking it (or at least the same energy system) in for Thursday? Or do I choose each week based on what my weekend rides are(n’t) likely to stress?
these are two adjustments I am making this year after accumulating a little more fatigue than I can handle. I think if you have a relatively high pain tolerance you can build up a significant fatigue debt without toning down things a little.
Yeah I find it useful. I keep an eye on HR decoupling at baseline for 1-2h z2 workouts, which i do a few times a week. My baseline is somewhere around 0-2% per 2h session.
If I have a session at 4% or higher I know I’m really reaching (either pushing training or not recovering enough) and need to be very careful with training volume and recovery over the next few days. Historically for me, a single session with elevated decoupling could just be due to a night or two of poor sleep, which then if I get a good nights sleep solves the problem and I go back to normal. It’s a “pay attention to what your doing and fix anything you can” sign for me.
If I then get another session at 4% or greater I know from experience I need to take a bit of a rest, which could be replacing a single threshold or VO2 workout with something easy, or maybe even taking a rest week early.
Like you said though, it’s something you need to watch for a bit and get a sense of what different values mean to you I think.
Definitely agree with this. Plan builder’s long term plan doesn’t matter much if you keep digging yourself into a hole now.
I think this may be something that should be emphasized more. But on TR (even with Plan Builder and AT) you are your own coach and TR is just a tool to help you coach yourself. So if you (the coach) know that you are super fatigued, then you change the plan, don’t let the plan dictate something that you know is wrong for you.
TR is like Google Maps. Most of the time it will get you where you’re trying to go in a great way. But if you’re driving along and the road you want to take is flooded out, then you’re not going to just keep driving through it and blindly follow the map. You’re going to turn around, get on a better road, and hopefully Google Maps can adapt to the new path and get you to where you’re going.
I think one thing that adaptive training and progression levels can communicate better is responses. I know that information is readily available somewhere in the website, but it would be nice if it was built into the app where the responses easy, moderate, hard, and so on, had the description of what that answer actually meant right next to them.
I know that it can be easy to fall into a trap where adaptive training over progresses you because you don’t rate the workouts appropriately. Luckily I only did that at the beginning and caught up to normal pretty quickly. But I feel like the specific level responses should be more obvious within the system, and preferably within the actual rating system itself. That would go a long way in keeping people from getting burnt out I think. @IvyAudrain is that something worth doing a feature request for or is something like that already in discussion internally?
Yeah, that seems more or less like what I just said! Having the explanation of the survey responses as part of the actual button you press would make it a lot easier to understand for people who don’t go hunting the forum or the help feature. It would be one of those things that is unavoidable, which is kind of nice when it comes to a subjective rating anyway lol. Thanks for looking into it!