What a week!
My legs are downright toast. Only one other week of training that I've recorded has had as much training stress as this week did.
I rode my standard long rides over the weekend and took my Monday off like normal, and then it was on to the hard stuff.
For the last month and a half or so, I've been doing the Tuesday and Thursday group rides out of Wakefield. They're great rides, attended by racers from the national champion level down to the Cat 5 level. Tuesday rides tend to be the more anaerobic workouts - very much simulating crit style speeds and surges. Thursday rides are typically attended by fewer of the hammerheads so they tend to be more steady state - "always on" - rides.
This Tuesday was a world of attacking like mad. Local killer, Bryan Vaughan, usually spices things up but I was feeling pretty good so I joined in the attacking. We rolled off the ride a bit shorter than normal due to high speeds, but the 53 minutes of hard work rolled out right at 360 watts with a little left in the tank. I was floored when I saw these numbers when I got home. Flat out, floored.
Wednesday was a solid, steady long ride and then I rolled into Thursday.
Thursday's Wakefield ride was a poorly attended event by the usual Cat 2's in the group so I figured I'd take my chance to work the front. I attacked once, that was covered. Once I got recovered in the group I just rolled to the front and applied pressure. Nothing crazy, but just enough to push through the tops of some of the rollers at the beginning of the ride. Sure enough, we'd softened up enough that only Chris and I got off the front, so now it was time to get a gap. By the time we hit the "halfway" stop light, I'd rolled a 30 minute pNorm 362. Chris was toast at his own admission, so I was content to work the rest of the ride. Chris did a fantastic job holding on the rest of the ride. Dialed back a bit but still did the second "half" at pNorm 320.
So, I woke up today pretty tired but facing a Saturday of torrential rains, so with a chance to get an early day from work I rolled into my 4 hours of "Saturday" long riding. By 3 hours I realized I'd not eaten well, hydrated well, or simply was plain tuckered out. When I got home and saw that I'd just carried through 7 days of training at 183 TSS/day avg, I realized it was an "all of the above" reason for suffering.
I'm at a training load (CTL ~ 139) that has only been seen last November, right before I "blew through" into overtraining. I'm going to be extremely careful the next few days. Fortunately, I begin two weeks race "freshening" to do the Turkey Day races and the Capital Crit.
If I can carry any sort of the form I'm on now into the last two races of the season, I should hopefully salvage what has otherwise been an uneventful year.
Ride safe, ride hard, ride lots.
VW
My legs are downright toast. Only one other week of training that I've recorded has had as much training stress as this week did.
I rode my standard long rides over the weekend and took my Monday off like normal, and then it was on to the hard stuff.
For the last month and a half or so, I've been doing the Tuesday and Thursday group rides out of Wakefield. They're great rides, attended by racers from the national champion level down to the Cat 5 level. Tuesday rides tend to be the more anaerobic workouts - very much simulating crit style speeds and surges. Thursday rides are typically attended by fewer of the hammerheads so they tend to be more steady state - "always on" - rides.
This Tuesday was a world of attacking like mad. Local killer, Bryan Vaughan, usually spices things up but I was feeling pretty good so I joined in the attacking. We rolled off the ride a bit shorter than normal due to high speeds, but the 53 minutes of hard work rolled out right at 360 watts with a little left in the tank. I was floored when I saw these numbers when I got home. Flat out, floored.
Wednesday was a solid, steady long ride and then I rolled into Thursday.
Thursday's Wakefield ride was a poorly attended event by the usual Cat 2's in the group so I figured I'd take my chance to work the front. I attacked once, that was covered. Once I got recovered in the group I just rolled to the front and applied pressure. Nothing crazy, but just enough to push through the tops of some of the rollers at the beginning of the ride. Sure enough, we'd softened up enough that only Chris and I got off the front, so now it was time to get a gap. By the time we hit the "halfway" stop light, I'd rolled a 30 minute pNorm 362. Chris was toast at his own admission, so I was content to work the rest of the ride. Chris did a fantastic job holding on the rest of the ride. Dialed back a bit but still did the second "half" at pNorm 320.
So, I woke up today pretty tired but facing a Saturday of torrential rains, so with a chance to get an early day from work I rolled into my 4 hours of "Saturday" long riding. By 3 hours I realized I'd not eaten well, hydrated well, or simply was plain tuckered out. When I got home and saw that I'd just carried through 7 days of training at 183 TSS/day avg, I realized it was an "all of the above" reason for suffering.
I'm at a training load (CTL ~ 139) that has only been seen last November, right before I "blew through" into overtraining. I'm going to be extremely careful the next few days. Fortunately, I begin two weeks race "freshening" to do the Turkey Day races and the Capital Crit.
If I can carry any sort of the form I'm on now into the last two races of the season, I should hopefully salvage what has otherwise been an uneventful year.
Ride safe, ride hard, ride lots.
VW