If racing isn’t your job, then I’d prioritize your health and happiness first, then your long-term growth and development second, and only THEN your race prep in third place.
That’s a very fair point. Where I suggest a change is focusing on process over product. You’ve been in a bad mood because you’ve been sick, you haven’t been able to ride. Those are outcomes and you cannot fully control what happens in your life.
If/when you can convince yourself that you draw happiness from your EFFORT and CARE to train, ride, and race as well as you can, and NOT from the results that arise when those efforts meet outside realities, you will find it easier to…
-
Try to prevent being sick because that’s in your control. Sleep, eat, rest, work, and play in a way that will complement or improve your ability to ride and race.
-
Accept that shit happens when you get sick or injured – and you WILL get sick or injured at some point, obviously – and then do the best you can to recover and heal. Draw happiness from taking the best care of yourself possible, from minimizing the consequences of being sick, including from being patient and not rushing the recovery which can lead to a relapse and more problems.
And so on. Focus on what you control. Draw happiness from that. Accept the things you cannot change, fight hard for those things you CAN and be happy with how well you fight, not whether you win or lose any given bout.
I’m kind of in the same boat, I strained my serratus anterior and can’t put weight on my arm.
I was starting out my base season with hitting 20-30 minute all time PRs. Now I can’t do anything but rest and hope I can ride in the next month.
Like @AgingCannon mentioned; I would listen to his advice. The end of the day I don’t get paid to ride, sure it brings me a shit ton of happiness and clears my mind of life stress. Racing gives me a chance to push my limits which also brings me joy. I can’t do any of that except goto work and try to rest my arm.
It’s depressing to be honest but trying to push through injury or Illness will only make my recovery longer.
So let’s push the thought experiment further along then. WHY does training and racing bring me joy and happiness? Pushing my limits has been mentioned. Growing. Setting myself goals, making promises to myself, then reaching those goals and keeping those promises. All of that, great. Also, simply showing (myself) that I have the discipline to do hard things and put in the time/effort/sacrifice. And of course, competing.
So if I can’t ride for a month, how do I still do ALL of that? Maybe this is a time to do great core work that I’ve set aside. Maybe I focus on a little weight loss. Maybe this is the time to do some serious leg work in the gym.
Because life is about balance, maybe this is the time to plan a long weekend with my spouse and take that fun “date trip” to Niagara Falls. Maybe this is the time I get that certification for work that I haven’t had time to do.
Maybe a million things. But X happened, and the key question is ALWAYS: what am I going to do about it, or in response to it? How do I gain from it as much as possible? What does this allow me to do that improves my life (and brings me happiness) as much as possible?
And then, one of the key things that happens is that I draw mental health and happiness from knowing that I’m doing EVERYTHING I can to have the best life I can, including training and racing as best I can, in the context of whatever life throws at me.
Satisfaction and joy have to come from the things that are in my control.
I like your attitude! I’m currently working on some certifications for my career. Now is a great time to spend my workout time to learn more.
It’s also the first time I’ve taken more than a week off of working out in a long time. So it might be a good thing in the long run!
In complement to the philosophical conversation we’ve already started, my answer to this specific question would be that it’s great to ask for others’ advice as you’re doing to make a better choice. But whatever advice you get, make the best choice you can with the information available to you then move on and execute on that choice with all you’ve got.
In the end, whatever choice you make will have pros and cons. But you can live with the consequences easily as long as you know and remember that you’re not perfect, and you made the best choice you could under the circumstances.
Even if you’re “flat” for the races, you fight as hard as you can given your condition on that day and you can then be happy with the work/effort/care/thought you put into the whole enchilada.
How you place in the rankings really does not matter. What matters is that you put in your best, on all fronts, for that moment.
The moment you start thinking like that, you can MAKE IT be a good thing by the choices you make. 
“If we all thought alike, everyone would be after my wife.”
–Unknown
God bless you, and I wish you many, many wins and great results!
I like training for results and wanting to win, isn’t that the reason why some of us train so much. I’m hurt now and if I had an event in a month or 2, I’d have to lower my expectations. Even then, there’s almost always someone that’s faster, no matter how hard i train.
I like setting process, performance and outcome goals. If I don’t get the outcome goal, I have small victories for hitting performance and process goals.
The end of the day all this training and racing doesn’t pay my bills, so maybe that’s why my attitude is what it is.
I do my best and forget the rest, results are great goals but aren’t my be all end all.
I also enjoy the process more than the destination, placing all that stress on myself to win sounds miserable.
Speaking of everyone doing it differently. I’d probably try to ride myself into fitness like some TdF rider. hit it really hard tailored to the omnium, with a peak at the omnium ( making the omnium the final workouts at the end of my hard hitting block) take an easy z2 week for consolidation, then threshold → vo2, taper to the A race.
But I’m a weirdo. Not to get all Filo Soff Ickal… but I guess I’d just figure, hey if the whole thing is scuppered why not try to swing for the fences. At least if I fail I’ll have a good laugh and learn something. But…If I do well, if I win. That would be Epic.
I’m all about the Epic.
End of progression. Just one threshold workout per week + high tempo on a long ride. Started low, progressed fast. Done at little below what I think is my ftp. Riding about 16hrs per week.
#1 30min
#2 30min + 15min
3# 50min
Got one tempo workout left, did 2hrs @ 86%ish on a 4 hour ride not sure how to progress from there, maybe I’ll do another threshold workout.
Last spring I ended my threshold progression with 60min at 350W. After that I did a couple months of race preparation and racing (anaerobic stuff, 40/20s etc) and afterwards now in summer mostly easy endurance riding (190-210W normalized power rides, volume 10-15h per week). Basically no vo2max work or other hard aerobic stuff.
Last week I did my first FTP + TTE test after that 60min effort in the spring. To my big surprise, I managed 35min at 362W, so a 12W increase! Coach said it was due to being more rested and maybe that’s true, but I was still quite surprised – I thought that if anything, I would be down 10 watts! And this is with a CTL never exceeding 75, lol.
Continuing now with sweetspot progression instead of threshold, first workout was 30min + 35min at 330W. It’s fun to come back to this extensive TTE stuff, I like riding fast and doing heavy carb loading to keep up with the kilojoules burned haha.
@hubba Nice effort! How did you continue progress from there?
Good watts for 75 CTL, what’s your weight?
I got sick during rest week after the block. Exact same thing happened during spring, my threshold blocks are cursed.
Just getting back to training trying to rebuild my strength again.
Right now my weight is around 84-85kg, my goal is to drop to around 80kg for next season. 190cm tall.
CTL is a funny thing, it might be because I do endurance rides so easy but I’ve always struggled with getting high TSS in. Mostly my weekly TSS is in the 500-650 range, then I occasionally take a lighter week with lower TSS, and consequently the CTL never really increases much past 70. I have no idea how people manage to have a CTL of above 100 with 10-15h of riding, I know I would burn out if I were to try to increase the intensity of my endurance rides or add an extra hard workout a week, for example. But I know most of my clubmates have much higher CTL from group rides etc, while I ride mostly alone, so that might be a factor.
Damn, getting sick is the downside of these harder training blocks. I’ve had the same problem after vo2max blocks. I hope that you’ll regain fitness soon.
It is my time to bring this thread back in to attention (it’s been a while).
This thread has been a great resource for planning a good threshold workout progression;
- Start with workout threshold TiZ of about 80% of TTE and progress to 100-120% of TTE
- Interval length at least 10, but quickly 15min+ preferably
- Aim for 96-99% of FTP
Now here is where I could use some input, I feel I miss a piece of the puzzle. What total weekly TiZ should I aim for?
Say I ride about 10 to 12hrs a week. My goal is long sustained climbing, non-competitve granfondo riding with a lot of time spend at around 85% of FTP.
During my Threshold build block, before going in to sweetspot/tempo build towards the event, what would be a good weekly threshold TiZ if I do two Threshold Workouts?
Is it just as simple as doing two similar workouts (so for example the first week 2 workouts of aprox. 40min TiZ for a total of 80min TiZ)? And build that to two similar workouts of about 60-70min TiZ for about 130min at the end of the build?
Let’s say you want to take your TiZ (per workout) from 40 minutes to 90 minutes (as you might if you did a 30-minute interval in each hour of your long ride)
That’s 50 minutes to add, and it’s probably sensible to add (on average) about 5 minutes per workout. I make that 11 workouts.
Depending on the training density and how you recover, you may need a slower progression. At twice a week, you’d be adding 10 minutes per week to your interval length per week. At three times a week you’d be adding 15 minutes per week and that might be rough.
Since individuals can hold FTP for different durations (seems to be accepted here it can be anywhere from 40-70 min) you may want to quantify your effort differently, or at least identify how long you you can hold your FTP. Intensity of 99% FTP is essentially race pace for that length of time. In my experience one effort per week is sufficient.
I also know that many focus on time in zone as the key metric but I think recovery should not be overlooked. Granted this was a couple of decades ago, but going from college to training/being around professionals, I was surprised how short & intense recoveries were. They literally trained their bodies to recover while maintaining tempo pace.
Another thing I noticed… the only time we broke up threshold/sweet spot/tempo efforts would be super-threshold. The longer the duration, the pace would decrease (i.e. sweet spot or tempo, though we called it differently). Ultimately it comes down to fatigue management. How many race efforts can you maintain a week before breaking down?
I used to hate threshold and sweet spot workouts, so I started focusing on longer intervals to address that weakness and eventually, I even began to look forward to them!
Because of my relatively high anaerobic capacity, AI FTP detection and ramp tests tend to overestimate my FTP, so I manually set my FTP instead. I replaced over-unders with threshold workouts and have worked my way up to doing 3x20min at threshold and 2x30min at sweet spot.
With a long MTB event coming up in May (about 9 weeks away), I’d like to reintroduce over-unders. However, I’m on a low-volume plan. How often should I continue doing these longer intervals to maintain the TTE I’ve built, while shifting back to shorter over-unders?
I’d just do over/unders for the same duration as your steady-state intervals. So for a 20 minute interval, you’d do:
4 ×
4 mins at about 90%
1 min at about 110%
Thanks that looks better then the crazy 115% stuff I see in some of the TR overunder workouts, I think I should build my own workouts, since longer intervals with the type of over unders you suggest seem to be missing from TrainerRoad.