More ramblings

You gotta love rest and recovery weeks. Tons of zone 2 work and a test or two. I was so excited to test that I moved my 30 minute CP test to yesterday thinking all the hard work in build would render big changes. It looked like that was going to be the case for the first fifteen minutes. I was feeling really good thinking I would really rev up the pace at the midpoint but, alas, that was not the case. At that point I began to feel weaker and weaker. By the time I was coming down to the last 3 minutes I knew I was not having a good day and instead of suffering needlessly I ended the test. I probably could have raised the result by a watt or two by going full anaerobic in those last few minutes. Instead, I retired. The power file revealed 296 watts which is an 11 watt decrease from last month. Egads!! This is where self-coaching gets really hard. I got down on myself and just figured I was going in reverse but what really happened?

To get to the bottom of this you have to know something about the "Valley of Fatigue". This is a term I learned from Joe Friel. As you train with intensity you begin at a certain level of fitness. Let's assign it an arbitrary number of "10". As you begin to train over build 1, fitness begins to fall as the stress of training wears on your physiological systems. This overload is necessary to force adaptation. After week 1 fitness falls to, say, 9, then 8 in week two and so on until you arrive at week 4 which is rest and recovery. A that point you are dangerously close to being overtrained. Let's assign another arbitrary number of "2" to denote this point. The goal is to train hard enough so that fitness drops to 2.0001 then administer rest in the fourth week. The body then adapts to the stress and fitness rises back up to say "11". Now build continues as does this pattern of falling fitness back to just above the point of overtraining. Then, peaking kicks in and a gradual pulling back on volume and intensity allow fitness to rise. Finally, race week comes with even more dramatic reductions in training stress and fitness soars to, let's say, "15.

So, here's what I think happened yesterday. I finished build 1 on Sunday with a zone 3-ish ride. Saturday was a killer Tmax day. I managed 6 of these very nasty things. I didn't sleep at all Sunday night and rested on Monday. Tuesday came along and I tested. I believe my fitness was still depressed from the training stress and adaptation didn't have time to do its work. My fitness was recovering from near overtraining. To score higher than previous tests, I needed enough time for fitness to rise above our arbitrary beginning point of "10".

The training plan is correct and the training stress combined with proper rest should do its work. This is where the athlete has to believe in his training and not panic. I do and I won't but it is not easy for the self-coached athlete. In my mind I have to fight the inclination to introduce even more training stress thinking I haven't trained hard enough.

So, I am going to rest even more this week and skip my graduated exercise test then, hopefully, race this weekend. Paul asked me to coach the the neophytes before the C-race on Sunday which means it will be difficult to get to the A-race with church and family requirements. BB has been on me looking for a plan. He's okay. He will get the C-race for sure then he can go to church.

Rock on...