For some reason I just cant manage the Saturday workouts on SSB2 MV. Ive done the same 6 weeks before during the autumn where I could do the weekend rides outside which for me is so much easier. Im lucky enough to be able to ride inside on a track on Sundays still so the sunday rides are fine and I can even push harder than planned on these rides. But for some reason I just cant handle the saturday rides inside.
Can anyone take a look at my calendar and maybe see a reason to why I just cant manage it.
What happens is that my legs hurt and mentally I just cant push my self to keep going, Looking at this weeks Xthursday ride that should be harder or equal in terms of effort and that was no problem. I also have a mental block when it comes to saturdays where I dread the workout even before it started.
If this is you, you’ll need to make your profile public (in your account settings).
Does that mean you did SSB2MV before, or SSB1MV?
Were you replacing both weekend workouts with outside rides? Were you doing the actual workouts outside with a power meter and following the intervals?
Wow, yup, that’s Mary Austin -1 outside, you are a superior being, hats off.
Ok so a bunch of stuff could be happening (poor nutrition, lack of sleep, external stressors, anxiety like you said, etc.) Stuff I notice:
You ramp test inside, so your workouts are dialed to your indoor FTP. If your outdoor FTP is higher (which is super common), that may be why the outside workouts feel easier.
You had two very chill weeks before your latest ramp, and you struggled with the long Saturday workouts indoors (Leconte and Kaweah) in your first pass through SSB2MV before that. Strength endurance may be a growth area for you, and doing workouts outside may have been hiding it.
You couldn’t manage two 10-minute threshold intervals in Kaweah in your current block, but you smashed three 12-minute threshold intervals 5 days later with Donner. Kaweah was preceded by what looks like commutes the previous day and Ebbetts the day before that; Donner was preceded by a rest day and a recovery day.
You handled 4x8 threshold intervals with sprints in Jepson, then cracked after 9 minutes of Carpathian Peak +2 after one rest day.
You did 4x10 threshold intervals in Darwin, then couldn’t get through Mary Austin after one rest day.
Maybe you’d benefit from another day of rest/recovery before the Saturday workouts? Alternatively, I’m wondering what would happen if you swapped the weekend workouts (Sunday workout inside on Saturday, Saturday workout outside on the track). You could benefit from your possibly higher outside FTP where it counts, and stop dreading Saturday because you know you can do sweet spot inside no problem.
Excellent answer above! Just want to add, how stressy is your week? Maybe after a full week of work until Friday, you mentally need some downtime. Riding outside is usually helpful, but making yourself do an inside workout might be too much. I find that I do best if I have Saturday off and can recover from a week in work (often do a shorter outdoor ride if the weather allows). A half-way solution would be to move the workouts around and schedule one of the easier, shorter workouts for Saturday.
For me, I had to start taking Saturdays as recovery. It’s a day that I can typically rest effectively, so while it’s common to want to bang out two hard weekend workouts/rides I’m finding that a real dedicated rest day on a weekend (no work) is required. It’s a nice mental break from getting up early on the trainer too. Quality and quantity ratio.
I think more of us busy 9-5, mon - fri folks should consider a quality rest day on the weekends. I need a day to recharge fully and look forward to it now. This is a new change in thinking and schedule for me.
If you can accommodate that change I would consider it. Also the comment about indoor and outdoor ftp is true for most of us (I accept my lower ftp indoors when I plan several weeks or more on the trainer, when taking rides outdoors I need to increase the effort)
Good luck I think your problem is probably common, a little tweaking and change of perspective will help. Otherwise just accept that your Saturday AM workout is going to be hard, maybe unpleasant. For me, that was a deal breaker.
I do this all the time. I swap Thursday and Saturday pretty much as a rule anymore. I handle these workouts much better in the evening for some reason.
Hard to top what’s already been said. Just to elaborate on nutrition, are you fueling up on carbs prior to and during the weekend workouts? If I’ve learned one thing from TR, it’s that carbs, even for a 60 minute workout, lower my RPE. Another that doesn’t work for everyone, but really adds benefit for me, is some good heavy pumping music. I find that my legs and lungs are a lot stronger when my mind is sharp.
Thank you so much for taking the time and giving me all these thoughts.
Getting more recovery in before saturday will be hard since I want to stay consistent with 5 days and around 6 hours. But swapping saturday and sunday is a good thing and also to get one of the recovery days into the weekend,
Now its only 1 week left go this torture and then im heading into build which will probably bee even more torture but then I will use these tips to get me through it.
One thing I thought about was if the thuesday VO2Max workout stresses another type of fibers than threshold work. So when hitting the threshold workout on thursdays which I can manage those “threshold fibers” are fresher than they are come saturday due to the thursday workout. Is there any truth to that or is it the same fibers at work?
I use Tailwind Nutrition for almost every ride I do and also take Tailwind Rebuild after the harder once. I don’t think this is the problem. However, Im having trouble not to over eat before my rides. I do most of my rides in the evening (which could also be a factor cuz my weekend rides are usually done earlier) and that is once the kids gone to bed and that is just an hour after dinner. So usually Im filled up with food just as I begin my workouts but my problem doesn’t lie in the workouts during the week but rather the weekend.
I hear you. I actually have the opposite issue. I used to always workout in the mornings and still tend to on weekends, so my weekday nighttime rides are a motivational struggle.
I am nowhere close to a physiology expert, but my layperson understanding is that even if different types of workouts start out recruiting different muscle fibers types, as those fibers fatigue you start pulling in the other type. The workouts in SSB are really focused on repeatability and fatigue-resistance, so it might be a wash, fiber-wise?
I’m also not sure you’re necessarily looking at significantly different fiber types between VO2max and threshold workouts. Type II fibers (fast-twitch) are the anaerobic ones, that get recruited for explosive efforts and fatigue quickly. I think even with VO2max workouts you’re still looking at Type I (slow-twitch) since you’re still in the aerobic metabolism range, but I’m emphatically unsure about all of this and somebody who knows things should probably correct me.
Muscle fiber aside, I could totally buy that the threshold | rest | threshold sequence is what’s doing you in. Your Thursday and Saturday workouts are stressing roughly the same energy systems, so maybe swapping Tuesday and Thursday (so threshold | recovery | vo2max | rest | threshold) would give you enough of a break from strength endurance work to recover for Saturday.
and then im heading into build which will probably bee even more torture but then I will use these tips to get me through it.