Don't seem to be able to recover

On October 20th I did a ride/Race, it was pretty hard, not the hardest I have done though, but just came out of my priority A race a few weeks back which had lots of climbing, so my training was sustained power build and then century specialty (both training blocks have little V02max training in it) It seems to me I was really unprepared for the demands of this ride/race if you take a look at the power ranges below…(all the anaerobic time was in the first 1:15 Hr of the ride)
Felt good after the race, fully rested a day, then did a one hour sprint workout “Guard” which is pretty tough, all was going well, until the last two sets which could not fully complete, since then, about a week now, I don’t seem to be able to recover, achy legs, fatigue, just not well. I have done a 1.5 hr easy ride since then and felt like crap, not being able to push the pedals hard…
Any thoughts on how to get this over with would be really appreciated!
Thanks!

Coasting
0:10:02
6.3%

Active Recovery
0:46:26
29.1%

Endurance
0:22:15
14.0%

Tempo
0:14:10
8.9%

Sweet Spot
0:09:23
5.9%

Threshold
0:15:36
9.8%

VO2 Max
0:16:16
10.2%

Anaerobic
0:25:14
15.8%

Whilst this might not totally apply to your situation, there is an excellent snippet from a recent TR Podcast on YouTube. They discuss overreaching and the effects as well as recovery. I’d highly recommend finding this and having a listen.

Quality rest might be all you need but there might be something else at play and this snippet could prove useful.

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One word. Rest.

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All of the above +1
It could be you went deep and have caught a bug and your run down. Rest for 3-4 days. Eat well and healthy

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I’m confused. It’s October 21st for me (just). Can you time travel?

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Lol! Good catch! ride/race was October 13th now we can add to symptoms mental confusion :slight_smile:

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Focus on recovering well, so aim for a little extra sleep, good quality nutrition and a few days off the bike. I’m wondering if the affects of the hard race and training is taking a toll on your body along with the fact that you may be fighting some sort of virus.
When you decide to return to training opt for a recovery workout or an unstructured ride to see how the body feels.

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I had a pretty similar issue in January - I thought I was taking it easy but then maybe had a little virus, fainted and ended up in hospital.

Rest!! Sleep 8+ hours until you stop waking up tired. If it’s anything like what I had then it’s going to be a couple of months before you’re back to normal.

Here’s the old thread if you want a read

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It is very common to get sick and/or feel very fatigued shortly after a peak. Presuming you did the entire base/build/specialty progression it sounds like you just need a few weeks of downtime post peak before you resume training.

Sort of guessing on the timing and making assumptions about your training leading into your a race, but my guess would be you finished a taper into your A-event around the beginning of October and then attempted to maintain/stretch your fitness into this event around the middle of October. Totally normal to take some downtime after this type of fitness progression.

Take a week off, take a week easy, whatever you need to reset. Don’t worry about your fitness dropping - you just finished your main event. Let yourself detrain and come back and hit the intervals again in November

The newer you are to structured training, and the higher the peak you are aiming for, the more necessary this type of recovery becomes. As you establish more training years or aim for a more prolonged or ‘less steep’ peak the longer you can maintain fitness

All your assumptions are spot on, did all the progression and trained very hard, to the point that a few weeks prior to the event I couldn’t wait to be over with it, but since I’m no quitter I just got it done, so I extended the peak for a week, then tried to extend for second week for state road race but this was an obvious bad idea… I’m taking a full week off and then hopefully will do an easy group ride Saturday and see if I feel any better…