Just failed my first workout in a long time, what better excuse to overthink it with you all?
My calendar is public, so feel free to roast me.
Got new FTP on Monday to 263W.
Did my VO2-max on Tuesday, and I felt good.
Went for an endurance ride yesterday, maybe overshoot it a bit, but was feeling good…again.
Today’s SweetSpot (Geiger)…I wasn’t moving it. Intervals felt too hard, and I needed to stand up on the pedals to keep them moving. Tried to lower the intensity by 10% after the first set, but then something between the head and legs just exploded.
For the purpose of this needless speculation, here are my carbs for the last few days… Can I just give them the guilt, please?
Destroy me < 3
How did your legs feel going into the workout?
Sweetspot isn’t exactly my strong suit. I failed Eclipse - 3 sweetspot workout this week. I had to dial it down 3% and backpedaled a couple of times.
My legs didn’t feel that bad, honestly. I wasn’t in pain or struggled with stairs or anything else.
I didn’t expect that result, honestly.
For me I find that VO2 workouts are a completely different kind of fitness than Sweet Spot. Sweet Spot is much more about muscular endurance for me and I really feel it in my quads. Threshold and VO2 for me is more a generalized nervous system fatigue. Could be that you just need to work on muscular endurance. Those 3x15min sweet spot workouts can be a bit of a beast on the legs!
Something that might help is experimentation with cadence. I have found that for each zone there is a perfect cadence for me that strikes a manageable balance between muscular fatigue in the legs and gasping for air. Perhaps some explorations with cadence could improve your sustained effort numbers.
What is your weight and BF%? To me, it looks like you might be very underfueled (depending on these factors). I am about 76kg and 10-11% BF, and a day not on the bike has over 300g of carbs. And a 1.5 hour SS ride day ups that to 634g of carbs. Looking at your graph above, it looks like you’re averaging less than 300g of carbs per day, if I’m reading it correctly (though I can’t see Tues/Weds [mar/mer] due to the popup), with some days closer to 200.
Have you tried putting your week into the TR nutrition calculator?
I’m 74kg with a 20/22% BF (just eyeballing it).
I’m trying to lose some weight using MacroFactor. I always tend to overshoot carbs target (250-270 according to MF), but still far from what the nutrition calculator suggests (see photo attached).
Maybe that could be the cause; however, I haven’t had any problem in the last block.
Maybe I’ve exaggerated in the recovery week as well
I find after a recovery week and ftp increase I am fine with VO2 and threshold but sweet spot in that first week kicks my teeth in. By the next week I can’t understand why I failed or had to work so hard just to survive the SS workout from the week before. I started pushing sweet spot to week two after an ftp detection and the whole block is much smoother.
You mentioned cutting weight the last time I failed sweet spot I was in too big a deficit as well.
I’ll put up calories a bit, and try to come back next week. Unfortunately, I have a group ride on Saturday, so I will miss Threshold too, not a top week 
For what it’s worth, before the TR nutrition calculator was released (just a month, or so, ago, I think), I was really underfueling (at least according to the TR nutrition calculator. Since REALLLY upping my daily intake of carbs (and cutting my fat), I’m probably eating close to 1k more calories a day, on average, and I’ve lost a few pounds. It doesn’t seem to make sense, from a mathematical POV, but our bodies don’t follow that sort of approach. And underfueling your efforts just leads to your body slowing down other processes in order to not go into an energy deficit, and this will catch up with you. You might even end up putting on weight by cutting calories, which makes even less sense.
Long story, short: make sure you are fueling your energy demands adequately!
Just to follow up on this. How do you all rate the protein prescription of the TR calculator? It does seem a bit on the high range to me at 2g/kg
Personally, I’d say it’s spot-on with a lot of other research I’ve seen.
