I was in the midst of great training block and had a crash 8 days ago. (Hard smack, 3 broken ribs, hematoma on hip and left quad, back injury, various soft tissue injuries etc.)
I have FTP detection turned on so should I just sub in recovery rides until I’m healed up and ready to resume? I’ve managed to do three very short light trainer rides (55, 110, 150 watts average between 20 and 50 mins long)
Prior to crash trainer FTP is (was?) 318 watts and I was doing 4-6 hour gravel rides on the weekend along with regular SS plan during the week. (SS plan Medium volume with the longer weekend ride subbed in)
By how I’m feeling it’s going to be another ~3 weeks before I can ramp it up again. (I can only breath about 30-40% deep)
That’s super weird. I recently got hit by a car and just got back on the saddle eight days after with road rash still all over my body. First week back started out easy with some TR workouts but quickly got way too intense with a local A ride and some longer zone 2 & 3 solo rides. Second week back, this last week, I did some TR SS, threshold, and aneorobic rides, and a ride with a couple buddies on Friday (50 miles zone 4-5) that made me feels sick. I’ve had an elevated heart rate (10-15 bpm), probably due to my bruised ribs and decreased lung capacity, and feel like it just hasn’t got better since in the last two weeks. This was the point where I realized I probably came back too early and too intense and may have actually put myself in a hole that could take longer to climb out of. My FTP is almost the same as your at 315, and it went down just this week to 293 (it’s probably a bit lower than that). I decided to scale it back and take this upcoming week as my second recovery week, something I should have done two weeks ago. My advice, take it easy and don’t worry much about your FTP/fitness and focus on recovery because you’ll be worse off if you go too deep too soon. The sooner you get better by dedicating all your energy to injury recovery, the sooner you’ll be able to build back your fitness.
In the middle of March, I broke three ribs, collarbone, two vertebra, and collapsed my lung and had a concussion. Thankfully, all the damage was on one side of my body.
For the first two weeks all I could do was like 10, 15 minutes with my arm in a sling, sitting upright. Then I was able to do some longer workouts using train now, but I would often fatigue myself to the point where I had to take two days off.
Inability to get a good nights sleep, because of the pain from the ribs, is gonna hamper you for a while.
After a month, I was able to ride outside being very careful.
So, after that, I just tried to build up to where I was, CTL-wise. Then, I did a regular TrainerRoad build block, and now, I’m just doing some long base with no intensity I feel fully healed now.
Thank you both and sorry to hear of your respective crashes!
I think what I’ll do is just take it really easy the next two weeks, try to work up an hour of Z2 and then assess if I can handle more. Will TR be able to accurately predict the drop in FTP via AI?
I didn’t worry about FTP. I just used train now, and it tanked my PL’s after it saw how poorly I did during the workouts.
Initially, my first rides were all at the recovery level, I was basically unable to handle very much duration, so adaptive training figured out that I was performing very poorly.
