Training was going well leading into my first gravel race, where I rode about 3 hours and performed as expected. I took a few days easy afterward, but then failed several workouts that normally should have been manageable.
I kept most rides easy leading into race two, which was about 3 weeks after race one. Despite the poor training sessions, I held nearly the same power profile as race one for the first 2.5 hours of race two, which was a much harder 5+ hour technical gravel event.
After a few days off, endurance rides felt okay again, but I failed another VO2 workout even after lowering the intensity and taking breaks. TrainerRoad then suggested dropping my FTP from 242 to 222 W.
Resting HR, HRV, sleep, and general health have all looked normal. Easy endurance now feels fine, but harder sustained work has been inconsistent.
Does this sound like accumulated fatigue and insufficient recovery between races, or would you accept the FTP decrease and rebuild from there? Next race is in about 3 weeks. Should be about a 7 hour effort.
Yes, you’re just not recovered from the race yet and that takes priority over fitness gains until your body can handle it.
Nutrition and rest would be my priority.
You probably need a little more downtime after a long buildup to those events. I’d take it easy for another week or two before jumping into your next plan.
Thanks guys! I figured I probably needed a bit more rest, but just wanted the sanity check and didn’t expect my B races to leave me so fatigued. I’ll keep to lower intensity work until my legs are fresh enough.
Just wanted to double back in case this helps anyone in the future.
Apparently my kickr core 2 needed to be manually recalibrated. I only run it on erg mode for TR workouts so it never got the chance to auto calibrate. Not exactly sure how much it was off since I just use a zwift ride on the kickr, but it was not significant enough to affect zone 2 work, but enough to affect higher efforts.
On a good note, my body isn’t trash and can recover as expected.
I would assume that KICKRs auto-calibrate at the end of each ride when you get off the bike, and it’s able to coast to a stop.
I have had concerns about how effective this is when you exclusively use ERG mode, though.
Did you talk to Wahoo about this at any point, or did you just perform the manual calibration and see good results?
I’ve also found that performing manual spindowns on my KICKR CORE is very hit or miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve had very little faith that it’s working properly for the past couple of years.
I haven’t discussed this with Wahoo yet. I’m going to send them a message later today to see their input.
I did an rpe test then did the factory spindown and had a noticeable difference. I should have tested with my bike with a power meter to see what the actual difference was. I’ll post if anything significant comes from wahoo.
