Other things to remember:
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Not all TSS is created equal, at least in my experience. So the same amount of TSS can wear you down differently depending on the mix of intensities within it.
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what’s your caffeine consumption like? I used to drink a lot of coffee, like 8 or 9 cups, and during that time i was finding that my power / hr ratio was way different at the end of the day vs the beginning. I also just felt like crap. I think what was happening is that even though i was well habituated to caffeine use, being constantly “activated” was draining my body battery. I cut down to two cups first thing in the morning and my afternoon / evening workouts have improved substantially. They feel hard (because i’m not using caffeine as an ergogenic aid) but the results are better (and my garmin stops thinking that i’m on death’s door whenever i do them) and my sleep is better.
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What’re your endurance rides like? I have found that when you are only working out a few times a week, it doesn’t really matter how hard you go. You can go pretty hard and still recover. But as soon as you start ramping up the total stress (either by volume or intensity) it becomes absolutely critical for your easy rides to truly be easy. If you start substituting what are essentially “medium” rides for “easy” rides, it’ll eventually at the very least start to impact the quality of your hard rides and at worst the wheels can fall off the bus.
I think that this is the reason why so many people have success using “polarized training.” it’s not because 80/20 is better or a magic formula or whatever. I think it’s rather that it’s easier for many people to implement sustainably because of the intense focus on keeping easy days easy. It’s just like, imagine two diets, both of which equally effective assuming adherence, but one is easier to adhere to than the other. For a lot of people, that’s the better diet, even though both are theoretically just as effective.
On endurance rides I use HR as well as power to make sure that the brakes are on. Just because your power numbers say you should be fat-burning that day (vs. glycogen) doesn’t mean that you are. Remember those zones are just math, they don’t actually know what’s going on inside.
- Related to the above, ramp tests (and other tests) can overstate FTP if you’re an anaerobic beast or a gas guzzling 12 cylinder (think 800 meter, 1600 meter or even 5K runner vs. marathoner). This is not a problem and it doesn’t mean your fitness is “worse” than you thought. It just means your fitness is different than you thought, if it’s true. it might mean that your threshold intervals hsould be less power, but it very well could mean that your VO2 max intervals should be MORE power
Similarly, FTP (which is supposed to correlate to MLSS, right?) is only one marker. You could have an MLSS at around 200 watts, and the zones say that your switch between lipolysis and glycolisis should be at a certain percentage of that, but it might not actually be anywhere near that. In other words, your first lactate turnpoint could be lower than someone else’s, even if they have the same FTP. Meaning, certain endurance rides could be more taxing for you than for them, despite the power being the same and FTP being the same.
Again, not a problem per se, just gotta be aware. use all the tools at your disposal, not just power. People are quick to toss away heart rate becuase it’s “subjective and affected by other factors” but isn’t that, in a way, the beauty of it?
Good luck! Hope you find yourself back on the track you want. In the meantime, go hiking, lift weights, play with a dog, etc., i.e. find other ways to be active and have fun. Sometimes a mental break is needed as much as a physical one.
Sorry for the long post.