I didn’t mean to be flippant, but i laughed before because this is both art and science and it depends also based on what are your specific objectives and demands. all this is just my opinion but i’ve been adhering to it, more or less diligently, since scholastic competitive running days decades ago and things work best for me when I do.
So generally, i think it’s okay to accumulate some fatigue and that you can get a big adaptation benefit by doing this. This is accepted, right? It’s the principle of progressive overload: you gotta stress your body to make it respond.
First, just for context, then we’ll get into the question about how legs feel: I have two approaches, one when i have races coming up, and one when I don’t.
When I don’t have any races coming up, and i’m just working on general prep (i.e., what people call “base”), i like to try to intentionally overreach over a couple of weeks, or sometimes even just over a big, long weekend that i turn into like a mini “training camp.” During these load weeks, I try to build up as much load and fatigue as possible. The goal is to recover just enough from session to session that the following sessions are completable, but you’re never quite fully recovered. Then, once I’ve overreached and dug this hole, I’ll take a rest week, let the body repair itself and bounce back stronger from the training. There is no one right answer to how to do this but I like to overreach long and hard and then rest, rather than recovering more from session to session and building up less overall fatigue. I find that I personally get more of a bump.
Onto the feels: Doing this, it’s kind of weird, but the legs may or may not hurt, depending on the intensity balance. I think the reason is that when you do a lot of high intensity training, your body produces its fight or flight stress hormones because it as if it thinks to itself, “he wouldn’t be putting me through this unless there was a good reason, maybe he’s being chased by a sabre-tooth tiger.” Those hormones accumulate and they mask pain, so often, i will feel the worst during and after a rest week, after those hormones get cleared out.
So it sort of goes like this. You start training, start ramping up the volume to build your endurance, you feel often tired, but if you’re eating and sleeping right you can keep plugging. Then you start upping the intensity, do some intense training. It hurts real bad at first, but then it starts to hurt less, and your’e like wow, i’m flying, but really you’re building up a ton of damage. Then let’s say like, third week of the training block, it doesn’t hurt that bad but you start failing workouts, missing interval targets. This means, if you’ve done the build-up appropriately, that it’s time for a rest. You take a rest week, start to feel TERRIBLE. You feel okay at the end of your recovery rides during the rest week, but feel awful off the bike. You start your first load week and it sucks, you feel like garbage, legs are heavy and wooden, but you hit your targets. Yay! Second week, you’re hitting targets again, maybe even exceeding them, and it feels a lot better. This is now the time to load up again. Third week, maybe fourth week, you start failing intervals again, or maybe you don’t, but HR response during exercise is depressed. Time to rinse and repeat!
caveat 1: you have to have a certain amount of fitness for this to work, otherwise you just cook yourself more than you can recover from, and it’s wasted effort. Ergo, the whole objective of the first portion of my season is to get myself fit enough that i can do a mini “training camp” of overload and be able to complete the rides.
caveat 2: what fatigue feels like also depends on the intensity balance. I find that when i’m doing high intensity interval blocks, “fatigue” means not that much pain but inability to complete hte intervals. In low intensity endurance blocks, it feels bad all the time and fatigue is when i don’t feel like getting on the bike anymore, it’s hard to get out of bed, etc.
caveat 3: in the racing season, I wouldn’t do this. in racing season, when racing every weekend, there’s generally a point in the season where i want my legs to feel fresh and tasty at least for a few days of every single week. you give up some long-term endurance adaptation by trying to stay fresh, but if you don’t, if you get addicted to that feeling of being tired (because it must mean that you’re accomplishing something, right?) I think that you are leaving substantial performance on the table. you can take a weekend off from racing and throw in an endurance block in there if you need to. This is what the cx pros do in their mid-season “breaks” when they go off to leave the cold Belgian mud and do long rides in the sun in Mallorca.
Sorry for hte long post, but the upshot is, yes tired legs is okay, but remember that what the “feels” mean is not always intuitive because your body can fool you. Fight or flight masks your pain, sometimes recovery feels worse. The difference between good pain and bad pain can be very subtle and sometimes you only know which one it was with the benefit of hindsight.
