I am at the end of the end of Sweetspot Base Low Volume 2 and I’m about to go for a short vacation in a couple of days. I have two more weeks of training in this phase, with the last week being the “easy” week.
My question is: considering that I will be away for 4 days this week which will be predominantly filled with easy trail hikes in terms of exercise, and partying in terms of entertainment, would it be wise to switch up the last two weeks in the program?
What I was thinking is to do the “easy” week this week seeing that I am already slammed with work and short on time because of the vacation, so I can use the lower TSS and intensity, and to this week’s work next week (the last week in the program), which means I will enter the build phase without the “easy” week, which I don’t mind.
Does this make sense? Any tips on how to minimally disrupt the program in situations where life just bulldozes your schedule?
My $.02…whenever I have trips coming up, I try and raise my TSS / CTL as much as possible leading up to the trip and then using the trip as forced recovery. Usually works out pretty well…the only time it didn’t was last year leading up to Dirty Kanza…had a trip to Europe about 3 weeks out from DK and I pushed myself over the edge right before my trip, so I had to take it easy leading up to the trip, then had the forced time off from the trip, so I was a little flat for DK (plus I got sick the week before).
I have a 3 day trip next week, followed by 5 days in Asia in two weeks and I will be ramping up my TSS / CTL in advance of both trips.
If you could make it work I would probably do back to back today and tomorrow. Then just do the weekend long ride on Monday. Then you can do the recovery week on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday.
I have done this in the past and it worked well for me.
I’ve took up @Power13’s advice and will try to manage the three workouts in three days that I have available.
I did Spencer +2 yesterday (boy, do I hate VO2Max intervals longer than 2mins), and following that I did Lamarck today. I could feel that my legs were not a 100% but I made it through. These are tough!
Tomorrow morning I have Leconte and if that goes well I’m going to drink my weight in beer this weekend, I swear.