Can't get out of High Risk zone

Training
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Hi all,

I’m pretty new to intervals.icu - only been using it since May - and I’m certainly not as geeky as a lot of you on here (I mean that in a positive way ;-)) so I’m looking to your wisdom to see if I’m doing something wrong

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As you can see from my fitness graph, since I started using this site in May I’ve been virtually always in the high risk zone. The only time I’ve been out of it was a period in late June/early July and that was only because I was doing very little training (I did virtually no cycling and running for a few weeks, just a few swims). If I’m being honest, I was probably overdoing the training at the start (hence why I backed off at the end of June) so I understand why I was high risk then, but since I have picked up training again last week I have gone straight back into high risk. I don’t feel like I’m overdoing it (I’m doing two TR rides of approx 60 TSS and 1 outdoor ride of approx 150 TSS, plus a few 5km runs and a few swims per week). My perception is that as soon as I do an outdoor ride of any significant duration (e.g. 3 hours) my fatigue shoots up immediately and puts me into high risk.

So my question is - should I believe the data and back off (I really don’t feel like I need to) or does anyone have any idea why I’m getting this kind of data? Do others have this problem of constantly being in high risk?

For context, I’m a triathlete (mostly long course these days) with 8 seasons behind me so I’m pretty used to regular training and knowing when I’m overdoing it.

Thanks for any insights. Happy to provide any more information which might be helpful.

1 Like
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By design, fitness takes 42 days of usual training to be accurate in the first place, so unless you have some previous data to synchronise, I would recommend you to wait 2 more weeks without overdoing it before looking at the values (also as you stopped for some time).

I would also recommend to change the form to be absolute value rather than percentage (in the settings page). Percentage is good when you have significant fitness (above 100), but below that it tends to give you quite dramatic values in some configurations.

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Thank you for the info and the good tip. It already looks a lot better with form as an absolute value. :+1:

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You’re welcome! :slight_smile:
I would also tend to always favour your perception & experience vs the graph, especially as you have quite a few years of training behind you. The graph is good when you build your triaining plan in advance to stay in the green zone over your different blocks and reach the blue zone during your recovery weeks. Even though I still often go in the red zone usually on week-end with my long rides. But clearly I try no to stay there for an extended period of time!

2 Likes
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There is a todo list item to set starting values for fitness which will help with this.

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You truly believe you need to be this high for percentage to be useful? I was probably mid 60s in May and did the RGT Giro event, well, the first 10 stages anyway, I knew I was getting really tired but my absolute trace was green. I changed it to percentage and it was well into red which did tally with how I felt.