This has happened to me twice since beginning TR. Although my symptoms have not been nearly as severe as some others on this thread, I had to dial it back significantly.
The thing that was most annoying for me was that it coincided with being a bit sick – and I don’t know if my training started to fail because I was sick. Or if I got sick because I was over-training.
Like others here, both times I hit the “wall” it came off of a block of incredibly successful training/progress. The symptoms I had really didn’t affect me off the bike – no depression, sleep issues, etc. I just couldn’t complete workouts. Both times it lasted 4-5 weeks.
The first time I tried to fight through it and did what I could of the workouts, but it was an absolute parade of failures, back-pedaling, dialing down intensity, sometimes just quitting the workout altogether.
I just came off another block of this – and what I did was just suspend the plan I was on (in this case, general build) and I did nothing but endurance work, rode my bike how I wanted to outside, and when I felt up to it I would do a Sweet Spot workout. If the the Sweet Spot work felt excessively hard, I’d dial it back to endurance. If it felt manageable, I’d complete it.
I just did my first Vo2 workout in over a month on Monday and completed it. Through all of this my FTP went from 302 to 303…so I was able to tread water and hold fitness.
My n=1 experience and advice is: if you’re going through this, and don’t feel like getting on the bike – don’t. If you do feel like getting on the bike, stay away from any sort of intensity above sweet spot and nurse yourself back.
I’m 45, and given my age I’m starting to think about some sort of polarized approach to ensure this doesn’t keep happening. I’m not sure my life/work as well as training program can handle the amount of intensity in the TR plans. I’m thinking of modifying them to include 3-4 endurance rides a week, and 1 nutcracker of a Vo2 workout. The parade of Vo2 → Threshold → Vo2 → Sweet Spot -->Vo2 in the build programs seems to break me down after 4-5 weeks.
Hard days hard. Easy days easy. Everyone responds to everything differently and I’m just trying to figure out what works for me. When things are going well, it seems easy. But the frustration of hitting the “wall” for 4-6 weeks at a time is super frustrating.
Good luck.
EDIT: My personal feeling is that I need to nail my Vo2 work to keep pushing my FTP up. So I want to design everything around being able to really hammer at least 1 Vo2 workout a week. That’s the north star for me – and everything else needs to be tailored to that. And for me, maybe that’s more endurance work and less threshold/sweet spot work in between the Vo2 workouts. Who knows, maybe if I find the right grove I can do 2 Vo2 workouts per week if everything else is easy. We’ll see.