Ok, so currently my body feels physically okay, but I have an elevated HR during easy rides, elevated resting HR, and fatigue SUPER fast if I put power on the pedals (>Zone 3). I really need your help because I have a road race in 2-weeks and I feel I cannot ride past Zone 1. I don’t feel overtrained, sleep is great, I feel awesome, no really feel DOMS.
QUESTION: should I continue to ride easy in Z 1-2 until I get my snap back? Or should I completly rest?
Context:
I rode often in 2021 and raced a lot, avg 7-hours a week for the year, according to Strava. I took a 3-week active recovery break in December, and then started a camp. Here are my week-to-week details:
3-week “break” in Dec avg 3-5 hours of chill riding, then … Week 1 - 20-hr week 927 TSS felt ez and awesome
Week 2 - 3:47-hr recov 167 TSS Week 3 - 22-hr recov 1177 TSSfelt ez and awesome
Week 4 - 5:38-hr recov 300 TSS
Week 5 - 9:25-hr recov 457 TSS
Week 6 - 8:50-hr recov 427 TSS
So what can I do now to feel good in 2-weeks??? Keep in Z1 or stop all together?
When was the last time you did 20hrs?….I think not working your way up to that volume is the culprit.
You’d better wait until your resting HR is low again to push the watts.
Eat well, sleep well and forget about riding for as long as it takes to get the RHR low again. That’s what I would do. You don’t get that much by doing z1 rides anyways, they are a psychological crutch for ppl to feel they are adding hours.
I definitely feel that I was “ready”. Every year I’ll start the year with a training camp, like 15 hours. I train consistently, and racked up a lot of random 12-13 hour weeks each year, and honestly, both camps (20/22-hr) were easy to do. And I felt great the next week. But currently, no way could I now do a .78 IF TR sweet spot session.
You took a 3 week break, the jumped into th deep end with 20+ hours, took another week off, jumped back into the deep end with 20+ hours and have then not done a lot of volume.
You may be training “consistently” but you aren’t training “coherently”. You are all over the boards and your body doesn’t know what is going on.
My advice would be to slowly add more hours from your ~9 last week. Whether you can feel good in two weeks is honestly a question I don’t think anyone can answer. You have left it a bit late, I fear.
I agree with @Power13 and @Quaestor, you dug yourself too deep a hole and are paying the price now. That’s sometimes the tricky thing with training volume, you think you can deal with more — until you can’t.
AFAIK you should time training camps quite differently, you shouldn’t schedule them for the beginning, especially not first thing after a three-week break. And you did it twice, which seems very unwise. And in weeks 5–6 you went above last year’s average volume, too.
If I were you I’d drop down to Z1–Z2 only and limit yourself to 5 hours a week max. Everything you do should feel super easy. If it doesn’t, listen to your body and stop. Pay attention to your heart rate: is it still elevated? After three weeks of that, try a short, easy sweet spot workout and see how your body reacts. Have a look at how quickly your heart rate comes down from your sweet spot heart rate to your Z2 heart rate. If your heart rate won’t drop down and/or you feel fatigue, add 1–2 weeks of light endurance work.
My reading of your TSS calendar @fornes1 , after your first 20h week you stepped it right back the week after and felt awesome again the week after that and did a 22h week but didn’t step back as much and did’t feel as good and you then compounded it. The first time worked for you so you should have done something similar and maybe even dialled down TSS 10% further still to account for the 2 hours more. Hindsight is a wonderful thing though and I am probably guilty of doing something similar in the past. I’ve never seemed myself to benefit from complete rest but I scale it right back again for a week or two until your body tells you its ok to go harder again.
Just to add to what they said, I’ve often felt that Z2 just kicks fatigue can down the road and delays recovery. Like maybe you recover 10% instead of 30%. And then you do some more Z2 and you keep delaying full recovery. Maybe take 2 solid days off and then try a 30 minute Z1 ride and reassess.
As others said, keep resting. And actually rest. Any coach I’ve ever listened to would not recommend going from zero to 20 hours. Even pros won’t start at 20hours after their off season break.
Also, those 3 recovery weeks you listed are basically at an average IF of 0.7 and 2 of them are longer than what you listed as your average training for the last year. I would take the next week and do <5hrs and target an average IF of <0.6. You can’t recover from a camp like that as if it was just a normal hard training volume. You went from one month doing <10 hours to doing almost 60 the next. You’re going to have to rest HARD to get to the other side of that.