It does seem strange, you do a lot of riding 10+hrs a week and mostly as you say it’s easy riding. All good.
The workouts do strike me as big hard workouts, especially relative to the rest of your rides.
End of Jan, Kahweah is 90 mins sub threshold intervals done well. Feb you struggle with Palisade 90mins over unders) then a few weeks without workouts an you’re good with Mount Goode (90min sub threshold intervals) , fail Catpathian Peak (90min over unders) and the similar Fang Mountain.
At the same time you’re fine with 60min bo2/anaerobic interval workouts.
So, I still don’t know the cause but I would start by deleting next weeks Avalanche Spire!
Make that a sub threshold workout or a 45-60min threshold session. See if you can complete it.
noted, thanks! Given the advice here I may just knock the rest of this build phase on the head, take a week off and then go back to base.
On the subject of Palisade, that’s one of my favourite workouts (genuinely) and one I usually do well on. The same with Mary Austin historically, which makes this current situation all the more confusing.
Can’t believe no one has suggested Covid yet. I was hoping I could use that excuse
Not sure if this is useful for you but in my lack of experience with training last year I also regularly tried to bang out a tough work out to compensate for a failed work out that same week and I learned the hard way that this had negative consequences and I had to take some time off the time to recuperate and really teach myself to be strict in regards to listening to my body.
Now if I find i’m failing workouts I take some time to rest and then I reset my training plan to build up to that failed workout again. Consistency is key (and that is the same for rest as well).
Just to add to my thoughts. After failing my Thursday workout last week, I went and did an unstructured hard ride outside on the Friday. I set some all time power PRs for around the 1hr mark.
This doesn’t seem to correlate with being overly fatigued.
It seems that you talk about doing recovery rides between workouts but there are many weeks where you have at least one ride where you go out and smash it. I know you may not want to hear this because bikes are about having fun.
Have you looked into slowing these rides down drastically or dropping it for a few weeks. Also on these long unstructured rides how is your nutrition?
I haven’t talked about doin recovery rides, only Zone 2 riding.
There are only a couple of instances where I’ve “smashed it” and those rides have been on weeks where I’ve been doing 2 TR workouts rather than my usual 3, so overall stress and TiZ is lower than a normal 3-workout-week.
I am very very open to the idea of going easier or resting up, but my current circumstances really aren’t THAT different to the past 2 years which have worked very well for me. Couple that with normal HR, feelings of motivation and PRs outside of TR workouts and I’m scratching my head a bit…
Fuelling now is better than ever before in terms of amounts/timing of carbs and recovery shakes etc.
Based on what you have said I am assuming that workouts aren’t cut short for life (ie kids)
Thursday there is reference to Muddy Trails (MTB)? Which would not capture all the fatigue done to the body.
Friday you failed the work out then Saturday reduced intensity drastically and cut the ride short, which I can’t blame you 2+hrs on the trainer would drive me loopy I think. Then Sunday you went and essentially did Phoenix -3.
This was all followed up by a successful Baird +6 on Monday which is amazing, but unfortunately then you couldn’t recover in time for Fang on Thursday but followed that up with something like Pheonix +1
I am not trying to come across as a jerk I am just trying to point out something that many of us don’t like accepting and that is we can’t just endlessly push as hard as we want I went through something similar to this last summer when I had to stop training because of calf strains from running too hard on hills. As Amber has stated we must be nice to ourselves. Hopefully this helped even a little, take it easy.
Here are a few points in reply to your critique (PS. you dont come across as a jerk at all, I appreciate the help)
I dont think these weeks show a pattern of pushing too hard. Historically I have completed 3 TR workouts per week alongside approx 4-6 days of commuting (Zone 2 with a TSS of approx 45 per day) and a long weekend ride.
Hoffman wasnt part of my plan. I just picked a random workout to do a long trainer ride and adjusted the intensity to suit me. I wasn’t aiming to complete that workout at the prescribed wattage.
The muddy trails ride was on my CX bike with a PM. You will see that it was only an hour, with a very low IF. Time, IF and TSS are all lower than the commutes I would typically do on a week day (which have been cut back because I’m not going in to work every day due to lockdown).
Again, thanks for the reply and please dont consider these counter points to be me being unwilling to accept critique or change things up. I’m just yet to see a clear reason/pattern/change that would explain the symptoms I’m experiencing.
One other thing I noted is that I’m always experimenting with bike fit - by which I mean that for years now I’ve changed saddles, tweeked saddle height, saddle fore/aft etc. More recent rides have seen me adopt a slightly more forward saddle position. It feels great to ride like this but I’m wondering if this, at least in part, my contribute to increased quad recruitment which is tiring my legs out more than having a balance between quads/hamstrings.
Frankly, I think until you start to limit the number of variables you’re working with, you’re going to be on a constant search for an answer to this problem. If you want to comply with the plans, then make that a priority and ensure that all your rides not on the plan are constants rather than variables.
For example, last year I added a Z2 ride to my LV plan to increase my volume. I always made sure that ride was the same loop at the same intensity for the same amount of time week after week to ensure that if I failed a workout, that variable was a constant and wouldn’t be the cause of the problem. It removed that ride from the equation and I could look at nutrition, intensity, sleep, work stress, etc. instead.
Looking at you calendar, there are so many small jaunty rides and cut short workouts and added 5-minute Pettits to make up TSS and the like that it is no wonder you’re struggling for an answer. It’s so irregular and erratic that finding a clear conclusion is going to be impossible. I’d recommend trying to clean it all up. Make it easier to parse and follow. Cut out unnecessary KOM attempts. Drop the “just because” rides. Instead, create constants that are as close to constant as possible to remove them from your equation. Take rigorous notes on how you’re feeling and review them when things go awry.
Generally speaking, as soon as people start adding extra rides into their plan, as soon as they start doing group rides again, as soon as they start trying to smash Strava KOMs, that’s when they hit the forum with questions like yours. Often it’s that change in behavior that caused the problem.
And if you don’t believe that change in behavior is the cause of the problem, then it is probably time for a break. Two years without an extended break is a very long time. Even the World Tour pros take a month completely off the bike every year.
Yep, I agree with a lot of what you said. However the fact remains that I’m still operating in the same way I have for 2 years. So whilst it may seem erratic, it’s quite consistent. Consistently erratic maybe
Again, I must stress, this idea of “smashing” myself and “KOM attempts” is not the regular feature that a few people have made it out to be. I’ve done it a handful of times AFTER already experiencing problems in my training. Foolish? Probably. The original cause of the problem? I don’t think so.
As I said before, please don’t consider my replies to be dismissive. I really value all the feedback I’ve gotten and am taking it onboard. I simply want to challenge ideas and work things out as a collective.
I’m scratching my head about the problem but do concede that my riding could be a lot more structured than it currently is. I’ve let that slip in recent months admittedly.
With that in mind, I’m going to quit the rest of my build phase and just ride my easy Z2 rides outside, until there’s some bad weather, and then I’ll take a week entirely off the bike.
Just on a completely different track, have you ruled out that it is not your PM/trainer gone off calibration?
Also just to clarify - what do you mean when you say your legs can’t do it anymore? Spiral of death? Not able to increase cadence? Could you do it, but HR/RPE would go through the roof?
I use the same power meter indoors and outdoors. It’s calibrated before every ride and works well outdoors. Indoors it seems accurate too and correlates well with my HR, but the RPE is just way too high and my leg muscles feel kinda stiff and achey (not on fire like they normally would if I was normally pushing to failure in, say, a ramp test).
It’s less of a spiral and more of a sudden “hitting a wall”. The early intervals feel challenging but not unsustainable so I don’t have much cause for concern. But all of a sudden, I’m faced with leg muscles that just feel like they can’t possibly push for another second. Part of this is a mental cut-off, but its obviously physical too. My RPE up until this failure point isn’t much of a concern (otherwise I would reduce intensity in the earlier intervals) and my HR is in the correct place so there’s nothing there that causes me to worry either.
There is definitely an element of mentally enduring this, and I’m normally quite good at pushing through, but this hasn’t been possible recently. In a lot of the failed workouts you will notice that I backpedal or reduce intensity for an interval or 2 and then try again. My heart is really in it but my legs feel very heavy.
In the last couple workouts I increased the cadence a bit which certainly helps, but just not enough to get me through a whole workout and it’s far enough above my usual cadence to feel quite unsustainable.
Is that using Absolute Value or Percent of Fitness? I’ve found Percent of Fitness to give a more accurate representation of my trends as it relates it to my current fitness level. Try switching that by clicking the Options button at the top of the screen, and see what it returns. I’m betting it’s going to show you in the High Risk zone during that recent Optimal Zone training period.
@davidtinker can probably explain more clearly when and why you would want to use each of those filters/functions, but it does say on the site that Percent of Fitness is the more appropriate choice.
As an example, here’s how my last 12 months look with each of them. And I can tell you with complete certainty the Percent of Fitness one tracks way more closely with how I actually feel.
As you can see, my training does dip me into high risk at times, but it follows it with rest to recharge me for the next workout. And each recovery period brings me back into the fresh zone. Your graph shows you haven’t been in the fresh zone for nearly two months. So once a gain, time off the bike sounds like the correct medicine to me.
noted, thanks! Given the advice here I may just knock the rest of this build phase on the head, take a week off and then go back to base.
