Hi my first post and apologies if this has been asked a million times.
I’m in a bit of a quandary whether to repeat my SPBHV phase or continue on the RRRHV phase of my training following a period of sickness. To date training consisted on SSBHV1+2 and I had completed 5 weeks of SPBHV before I got sick with a virus. Training had been going well with good result till this point, unfortunately my partner and 2 children became quite sick (required a week off work and school,partner is teacher in a nursery school), which led to me adopting extra household duties, what also clashed with a period of extended travel for work. This also meant it was inevitable I would get sick at some point. In which I did, it resulted in 3 weeks off the bike with the 1st week in bed with a temp of 40c/104F, which led into, bronchitis, sinusitis and tonsillitis. After 3 weeks off I was in position to get back on the bike, felt horribly unfit but symptom free. I spent a week doing endurance type activities out on the road to get use to the saddle time again and another week doing some much shorter but intense workouts at reduced ftp on trainer road to get leg speed and HR up. Power and ability to make any type repeated effort significantly diminished even at reduce ftp setting.
I rearranged my training calendar and I am due to start RRRHV today to line up with some previous priority racing goals. However these races have a huge question mark over them now as due to my illness there are members of my race team that are in far better shape and likely to get selection over me at this time (this has been pretty much confirmed by the team manager, who hinted to look at other events).
My issue do I just take it on the chin and rebuild by power phase then go into RRR plan and look to other events in the year (possibly taking more of leading role as other team members have peaked and burned). Or start the RRR plan toady as scheduled and see what happens and sneak into the squad selection (The team has guest entry into UCI 1.2 race which is massive opportunity to ride with the big boys)
Sorry for War and Peace. Great product trainer road.
First, were you originally planning on doing Base and then jumping into your Specialty plan? We don’t recommend skipping phases, and would usually suggest following up Base with the Build phase before embarking on your Rolling Road Race Specialty plan.
Second, how are you doing with the high volume plans? They contain quite a heavy load of training, and we often see riders struggle with getting sick when they’re that fatigued. If you can stay healthy and continue training, go for it, but if not you may want to look into building in a little more rest into the plans or lowering the volume.
Third, it seems like you may be out of the running for some of these earlier races, but not all is lost! It sounds like you have your eye on a few different events instead of one specific “A” race. Because of this, you may want to ponder doing the Build Phase and the Specialty phase later so you peak/get in to race form a little later in the season. All too often, many riders peak early in the season and get burned out for the later races, leaving you a perfect opportunity to potentially dominate those races.
I think this depends on the outcome of a ramp test, if the FTP is down you need to redo some of build I would say. If the FTP is the same or higher then you are probably good to proceed.
I also wouldn’t get hung up on the exact timing of the training plans, finishing the specialty phase as opposed to finishing it 2 weeks early is the difference in percentage points really, the main thing is showing up to your event generally fit, well fueled and healthy.
So, I would say if you feel healthy,and your power does not negatively effected by your bout of illness to keep it going, if not rebuild, maybe just the second half of the build phase and target some other events.
Ahhhhh, thanks for catching that!! I’m not too great at acronyms… :
In that case, if @pjmcgrath is finished with the Sustained Power Build, as long as your FTP isn’t too affected I’d agree with @janerney - move on to the Specialty phase and see how it goes. Repeating all of Build isn’t a good idea for the reasons I mentioned above (it’s an overextension phase and pretty tough on your body/health). You could repeat weeks 1-2 of the Build phase to kick you back into gear before starting the Specialty phase, since they’re on the lower TSS end of the plan.
Hi thanks for your input @larry@janerney. Apologies for the abbreviations. Just in case it’s not clear I’ve completed sweet spot base hv 1 and sweet base hv 2 then completed 5 of the 8 weeks of sustained power build hv before illness struck. To that point all went well with ftp increases at all testing points.
Training wise I’ve being completing 9-14hr weeks for the last few years.
I have my ramp test planned for this evening and i think I will base my judgement off that as you have mentioned. If significant reduction I’ll repeat the sustained power build phase before moving onto the rolling road race plan. If the test is the same or even only a marginal decrease I think I’ll go down the rolling road race plan route and see if I can just make the team managers decision tricky for the UCI race. I really want to do the race as it is unique as has off road sectors similar to the classics.
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