I’ve been training pretty religiously since March, keeping myself in the “productive” form mode.
The part about that that is hard for an amateur athlete is knowing where your FTP or limit actually is. It’s not like heart rate or blood pressure that can be measured without a lot of difficulty.
The last 2 weeks have been pretty miserable. Bad and broken sleep (waking up in the middle of the night) No power on the bike (unable to keep even 50% of FTP going for more than a minute), exhaustion during the day, elevated (slightly) heart rate at night. HRV during sleep is off. It just generally been a mess. Too that all off with some type of injury to my forearms (really no idea what happened but I can’t even raise a gallon of milk right now with one hand) and I’ve had a pretty bad time.
Work hasn’t been easy either. Someone quit in our department and guess who got a good chunk of their work? This guy.
I have to keep going because I have the Ride Across INdiana event in July which I have already failed at once but man nothing feels good right now.
I’ve tried to pull back to just getting to -10 every day and that has helped some but it still feels really bad.
The good news is that my bike is absolutely silly and I can maintain a 15mph average doing almost no work. So I feel confident about the event if I spin down for a week beforehand.
PS edit : I know what injury feels like as I’ve done that a couple times already over the last 5 years and I’m pretty careful to avoid that level of exertion. I am not injured.
Take a short break, couple of days! Give your body some time to adapt to the new stress situation. Don´t push through, give yourself some time to wind down and then come back even stronger.
yah i think that’s the point I’m trying to navigate - where do you stop looking at the numbers and go off how your body is feeling?
like - am I just a wuss that I can’t handle the pain of developing myself or am I actually exhausted and need rest?
I keep going back and forth on that - so far I have opted to stay on the edge of my abilities (which is starting every day at like -7 and wrestling with the bike to get to -10) without forcing so much effort that I get injured but I also know I am very dangerously close to that line (from experience).
I think I know its unproductive - I just cant find it in myself to give up on it and take rest days.
This is mostly just public therapy if I’m being honest
Feel is and should always be the primary decision taker. The numbers are there to help you, not to take full control.
Re-read your first post consciously and all signs are there. Bad sleep, performance decrease, fatigue feeling, elevated HR, bad HRV.
Sounds like overreaching accompanied by greater amount of stress due to work conditions.
Don’t be blind about it, it will only get worse if you keep going.
This is the thing about being in an over-trained/over-stressed state - it doesn’t automatically mean everything will be terrible. I found that when I starting getting into an overtrained state, my racing performance would be a bit all over the place. Somedays feeling awesome, some days off the back. And not really being able to pinpoint why.
Don’t let this lure you into a false sense of “fitness.” If you take this as a sign that you can do more intensity, you’ll just keep burying yourself. @MedTechCD is right on here - take a few days off. And then don’t jump right back into what you were doing before, since that’s what got you here.
Cut out some intensity or some volume. Sounds like your goal is completion of this event, I’d say less intensity and more volume. And don’t worry about that volume being at like 100w-120w. You don’t need to knock yourself out intensity-wise to see benefits. I think this is where new cyclists can overdo it.
I would just like to briefly throw in something technical: Don’t forget to calibrate your power meter. Before every ride.
I know one person who felt terrible because his numbers were so “low”. He was doing big efforts, but the power seemed to drop every ride.
The magic moment was there, as we were once riding next to each other, and his numbers were way lower than mine. After calibrating right away, the numbers made sense again.
But apart from that, if you are feeling tired (!), then take a rest. Don’t be a slave of that numbers to push you in a “theoretical fitness zone”. If you are beginning training (again), just watch that it’s not every day “red”, but also don’t try do be every day in “green”. As a beginner it doesn’t really matter what you do, and how you do it. Don’t just do too much too fast.
Watch your numbers in the long term, not day to day, and e.g. check in some month your progress.
Here is one of my best executed October to May seasons (thank you coach Isaiah). Fitness had dropped substantially after taking off Sept (C-19). Sizable fitness increases (field tests) in January and May:
A lot of grey zone, but what you can’t see was the amount of endurance rides with mixed interval work, hard intervals that by design kept slowly increasing fitness according to a plan, and without the traditional signature of off-season/base/build cycle.
So is it the content and timing and organization of the training rides? Or keeping Form/TSB between -10 and -30?
Here is a very well designed 16 week base training program averaging 5 rides / 8 hours per week, starting from 0 CTL:
Six months ago in December I essentially did the first 8 weeks of that plan above, not quite from zero but it was hard. What you don’t see is all the neuromuscular work that really improved results without too much hard work.
Training is more than Form/TSB…
in fact Form/TSB was designed to be a signal that you’ve recovered enough to absorb and adapt from the hard work. After 3 hard weeks you take off 3 or 4 days for Form/TSB to come back a bit positive (everybody is different), as thats a signal that your body had enough rest to adapt to the hard training of the previous 3 weeks. That is a good rule if you took an off-season and restarting with base training, but as you saw from my 2nd chart above it’s not a rule to use indiscriminately. Numbers support feelings.
The most important thing is that you can’t stay in the “green zone” all the time. To achieve this, you would have to keep increasing your training load, without taking any rest, which is impossible for any human.
This is a recipe for disaster as you need rest to get the training adaptations and to recover from the training block. A common way to schedule your training is to do three weeks of training and then one week of rest. The rest week could be 1/2 of your normal load or less with almost no intensity.
Regarding your FTP, this should be quite easy to validate. Do a 10 minute plus max effort outdoors and see what Intervals shows as the eFTP value, or do a indoor ramp test.
Are you sure there’s not something up with your power meter? I don’t see how it would even be possible to do a century at 50w. That would be like putting the bike in the easiest gear and then trying to keep the pedals moving while putting as little pressure as you can through them.
While thats a legitimate question, my sister has an FTP that ranges from 90 to 110, so for her a century would be around 50W. And a retired neighbor, his training ftp is 120W.
It’s the 15mph at 50W that I can’t wrap my head around. I’m going ~15mph at 100W, but I’m 6’2" so I’m gonna need some sort of power. How tall are you @JASON_C_WILLIAMS ?
From my understanding, this is actually unproductive. The best improvements are by visiting the “productive” form sometimes, leaving space to recover. The training load system was invented to ensure athletes don’t train too much, rather than too little.
There’s a more recent movement to train based on RPE rather than load, and indeed intervals has Session-RPE for your activies if you fill out RPE.
You just have to let your body recover, that’s when it builds muscle.
If it makes you feel better, training load are for workout types that are aerobic, and for instance strength training therefore is not captured in those statistics. But if you do it, your aerobic metrics will improve.
Stop! Rest! Sleep! Take your bike to bits and service it! (That should stop you for a few days)
so my working theory is that the power meter (4iiii “Precision Pro” left crank) is calibrated in such a way to measure higher watts more accurately than lower watts.
I did another 50W century yesterday. I kept thinking that my bike computer was saying 50W that felt an awful lot like my previous bike saying 80W. The logic / excuse I had been thinking of is that I have a new bike this year with carbon rims and very nice lower rolling resistance whereas last year I was on a fully stock 2015 Giant Defy.
But … I’ve read a fair number of posts from people saying their 4iiii PMs are reading too light.
So unless I’m going to remember to calibrate it every single time I ride (I can tell you right now that I’m not) I will have to live with the numbers as they are and just compensate by lowering my FTP so that I don’t overtrain (which I probably have already done)
Also, please - no lectures on having an accurate PM - I’m not a professional, I’m barely even an amateur cyclist.
To my eyes, the rapid increases in time/volume looks like a plan to maximize the odds of achieving burnout and overreaching without a lot of fitness gains.
It’s even more hours than my late 20s friend that is a Cat1 and racing in some of the biggest US races.
Do you have a plan? Why the large volume (hours) increases?
Sorry, but 50w can’t be true. It should be at least twice the value. If you change the PM to another bike you have to calibrate it. Otherwise the values will just be random. If you change it again, it could be even higher, so then you are increasing your value again?
I have two 4iiii PM and they are quite accurate, if you calibrate them the very first time on the bike and then from time to time …
