I’m 46 yrs old and training to ride up Pikes Peak in August but I have really struggled to improve over the last 3 months. I saw a lot of improvement early on but it slowed down considerably so I switched to a Masters 40k TT plan. I also went from a recovery week every 4th week to having it every 3rd week. This week (week 2) I had trouble completing both workouts.
Should I drop to just one high intensity session a week? I’ve tried to incorporate lifting but again, I feel like I can’t recover from it. It has become very demoralizing to not show improvement month after month.
Kinda hard to say without knowing your long term training history. But it’s very common to see some quick and obvious gains when starting a program. The more fitness you gain, the slower/harder it comes. And at times, it’s very hard to recognize gains because they don’t come in a linear fashion (often 2 steps forward, 1 back, etc.). And if you are just using estimated FTP as a measuring stick, that doesn’t tell the entire fitness story, so be careful there.
My only advice would be to find a level of training you can do consistently and ramp volume/intensity cautiously and slowly. Keep some level of weight training, but maybe cut it down to once a week. Building aerobic fitness is a long game. Years, not months. Unless you came in completely untrained with minimal history of endurance sports, I wouldn’t expect any dramatic improvements beyond those quick gains you got at the start. Do the work and your fitness will be what it is in August. Some people adapt quicker then others, but that doesn’t mean they have higher potential. A slow responder can have a higher ceiling than a fast responder, so it’s often just a matter of being patient and doing the work. Good luck.
That in its self builds a slightly different type of muscle structure. Not uncommon to struggle with those long hard work outs at first. You will be fine. Go slow and steady. Good luck on the climb.
I have no advice, other than I wish there were a “super masters” plan that let us smash it for 2 weeks, then ratchet it back for a week, then repeat. As an official “old fart” about a decade older than you, I am dying by week three and often dial week 4 WAY down.
I feel best with 2 weeks with intervals, then 1 week of chill zone 2, versus 3 weeks of intervals and 1 week of endurance. By week 3 I am cooked.
He’s my tried and true “Low Tech” method to determine if I’ve recovered and ready to ride.
If after taking a day off the bike and then you walk up (not run) just one flight of stairs and you are slightly out of breath…you are not fully recovered.
Always listen to your body first..before anything else.
Remember to “Train hard but rest harder”
I’d also might suggest reframing your cycling goal beyond your Pikes Peak ride. After that ride, what then? All that money spent on a nice bike, the planning, time and training effort to do the Pike…and then what?
Maybe focus on simply training hard, doing your best and then “keep on keeping on” and look to the next cycling opportunity.
Play the long game and enjoy the journey.
Lack of recovery is unfortunately the biggest training limiter when you’re older. You’re doing the right thing by switching to a master’s plan.
The classic other questions are:
Are you eating enough? Make sure you eat enough carbs, especially on the interval days. Try to do those workouts fully fueled and fresh. Afterwards, re-fuel with protein and more carbs.
Are you resting enough? With that I mean both sleep and “inactivity”, ie sat on the couch. Your body needs time to convert the exercise stimulus into new fitness. For me, full days off are also better than “recovery” rides or other light activities. If possible, I even try to have a weekend day as a rest day, instead of a work day.
If you have trouble completing workouts right now, I think it means you need a few days recovery now, and not when the plan has scheduled it. Fatigue can come from many things, training is just one of them.
And unfortunately endurance training is a slow process. I’d focus on small gains that you can track week on week. Things like being able to do more interval time, or higher power for the same time. With TR, I think you should see workout levels increase. Even just ticking off your sessions and not feeling destroyed is good indicator of increasing fitness.
What’s your total volume (hours/TSS per week) and what was it before this plan? And then how much life stress have you got going on off the bike?
46 isn’t that old. If you had the luxury of being a full time cyclist with all the time in the world to ride, recover, stretch, nap, lift, cook nutritionally balanced meals, etc then I’m pretty sure you could easily handle 2 hard sessions a week, lifting, decent Z2 volume, etc. Unfortunately 46 also tends to be about the peak time of life for work, family and other stuff going on which pushes cycling and recovery down the priority list!
I adjusted my plan to have a rest week every third week and I still had to significantly lower my intensity at the end of both of my hard sessions this week.
Before I switched to the Masters plan I would struggle at the end of the month and my AI FTP prediction would significantly drop and I would basically be back where I started at the beginning of the month.
Could/should/have you back(ed) off on the aggressiveness of the training plan in the settings? If not, you may still be trying to take too big of a bite with each workout. I mean, do you feel AI isn’t picking the right workouts? How are you answering the post ride surveys? Is AI appropriately showing yellow and red days (consistent with how you feel)? I’d expect that, at this point based on what you’ve said, the workouts the AI picks would be easier from week to week, and continue until you can “comfortably” complete them, because one point of the AI is you shouldn’t have to be making major, manual plan adjustments to complete the workouts (changing plans, changing to master’s, increasing recovery weeks, etc). If not, then you’re answering the survey wrong or may have a software bug. If all that is working right, then I’d say you’ve dug yourself into a hole that continued digging might not go in the direction you want. I’ve been there, and it wasn’t pretty.
You could call TrainerRoad and go over your situation with one of their people, and see what they say.
I’ve banged on about this before and here goes again!
I’m turning 53 this year and work in construction full time building my own home by hand. Its hugely physical obviously and the addition of training on top of that would be entirely impossible with EATING a lot of (good) food. Check out the nutrition calendar TR developed recently. I would wager there’s a good chance that the calories it suggests will alarm you as being way too much. My experience has been that its right on the money.
As it happened I addressed my caloric deficit well before the TR nutritional calendar came out but I will say that as soon as I started eating more and better (and plenty of protein) I started hitting lifting and cycling PRs and recovered WAY WAY faster and more completely.
Just my little hobby horse opinion. Can’t help barking about it, it completely changed my training success and fitness. Mileage may vary of course but worth a look I would say.
The masters plan is a good call. I’ve had my best results doing a high volume plan with 2 days of intensity. This is more aligned with contemporary training strategies that 3 hard workouts per week. I would also be careful about keeping your endurance rides easy. In the past I’ve done all my endurance at the very high end and that led to a ton of accumulated fatigue.
So what constitutes not recovering enough? Not finishing workouts?
What are you using as your FTP test…TRAI FTP..? It’s fraught with guess work. It may just be wrong for you. Do a proper FTP test and take it from there.
There is a lot of things to consider here and as others have said it’s difficult to provide specific guidance without diving into your data. I am a masters athelete and recently smashed through a prior plateau and here are a few things that I have found that helped:
Don’t do more than two hard days in a week, and preferably spread them out, possibly with rest days prior. TRAI can pick these out so that you keep progressing.
Easy days should be easy. I was definitely guilty of easy days creeping up or not being diciplined through an entire easy seasion as I was outside and my ego would be difficult to tame.
Sleep, sleep and more sleep. Relentlessly chase more and better sleep.
Fuel properly. I was definitely under eating and I think this is more a risk especially when trying to cut weight. the EA calculator helps to ensure you eat the right amount for the activity of the day but I have found that eating at the right times around the ride makes a massive difference in my recovery. This generally means moving more calories to before, during and immediately after the ride to ensure your body isn’t dealing with big deficits for a whole afternoon. I can see when I get this right in Garmin’s body battery, get it wrong the it falls like a rock through the day, get it right and it doesn’t fall and actually starts to rise before I go to bed.
Use the tools that TR provides, it will help you make hard days hard, not over cook yourself in the long term and hopefully keep pushing up.
There is something to be said for that. If you are doing 5 sessions a week, then one properly hard (VO2 max territory) is essentially Polarised. I am older than you (60 this year), but that is essentially what I do, with my long duration session counting as the other hard day. If you are not recovering, then you are not adapting to your training.
How many days and hours are you riding per week? All structured training or some unstructured too?
I’m the same age and for years would always plateau a little over 300w each year. Last year, I tried a block with more volume (mostly z2) and it seemed to allow me to break through that ceiling I’d been bumping up against. I do have to be very careful to walk a fine line to avoid overdoing it though.
