I am with you, I can’t stand it. Less so when it’s very light, but somewhere in that 70% range that many have long stretches where it’s far too easy to feel engaged by it, but just difficult enough where if I can’t really completely disengage.
I find workouts in the same range but more varied help. Something like Baxter -2 has similar overall workload, but I find it far easier to segment the work that way.
That’s good to know. I was inspired to try based on stuff in Skiba’s latest book about tapering and also in a re-read of Allen and Coggan’s book (3rd Ed.) talking about dosing/recovery cycles.
My take away was that we probably shouldn’t be drilling ourselves into the ground where we need a full week of almost nothing, but should have natural macro-cycles through high load and low load. I don’t know that either said this explicitly. All in all, the dosing/recovery part is more on the art side of coaching/training, which is tough for me.
Trying to figure this part out is my biggest focus right now for sure.
Look at the shorter alternatives of the same workout that pops up but only do 2 of the 3 rides that week if low-volume or 4 of the 5 rides in mid-vol plan (but do shorter alternatives). Then when you go outside on the skipped ride you can have some freedom to go just “a little” harder than prescribed. By doing this then then stress is not too far off.
That’s a good idea thanks!
Why not add some short sprints in to break up the long easy intervals? I find this helps a lot and I only do 20 second bursts and maybe do 3 or 4 in an hour. Nothing to intense, just go above ftp for 20 seconds. It really breaks up the session and gives you something to focus on. I also use the time to practice riding in my TT position, which is something I never do enough of.
I know what you mean though, it is tedious. I am on my rest week this week and I am not really looking forward to the endurance sessions, but it is definitely important to keep riding in whatever way you can, not that a week will cause a dramatic reduction in fitness, I just think it is a bad habit to get into, especially if you do it every rest week.
I took my rest week really easy on the bike about 24 tss a day. When I went on a group ride on sunday, my legs felt bad, like really bad. Any ideas
As rest week moves into the weekend my legs feel worse. I’m sure I’m dropping fatigue but RPE seems to go up and legs feel very flat. That first week back RPE is up for all of my workouts (even with a moderate FTP increase) and I typically don’t feel good until week 2.
I usually avg 600 tss a week. Last week I had 200tss going into sundays 200tss ride. So in the future maybe add a little more intensity mid week to keep all systems firing?
I’ll give it a shot next rest week
My legs often feel worse during the rest week, I also often feel more tired than during a training week… But it usually comes back pretty quickly. I guess I had always just assumed that was adaptations happening or something 
- no idea if that’s really the case.
I usually try and respect the rest week in terms of the TR rides but I will still do my club ride on the Saturday, mainly because I want to, but that usually heads it off a bit. I’ve had it before where I’ve ignored the rest weeks entirely and dug myself into a bit of a hole and got quite ill (i.e., 17 weeks March-July 2020 avg 700+ TSS a week with no week below 550…). So for me it’s definitely important to make sure the recovery weeks are actually recovery.
What’s being described above sounds more like how TR’s taper weeks are structured than a rest week, although I don’t know why they should need to be different or if there are any negatives from doing your rest weeks like that - would be interesting to hear the science on that.
I did read that adding bursts to your endurance/recovery rides has a lot of benefits though, so I often do that, and it makes them more interesting (I often do West Vidette as a Friday filler/easy ride and the +1 version has 2 “sprints” at the end for example).