It’s January and I’ve noticed a consistent theme amongst many folks around here, which is a tendency to want to really dial up the intensity, duration, or density of their training. It makes sense, everyone is fresh and motivated, with many folks doing a lot of indoor riding with the only markers of progress being an FTP assessment every 6 weeks, or a binary “I did the workout”.
I’d like to offer some advice, which is to think of yourself at your A race on the starting line, looking back at your training. Chances are you will be thinking about:
The workouts you failed (because they were “too hard” or you weren’t rested enough)
The workouts you missed
The rides you shouldn’t have done because they weren’t worth it and you felt too tired later
The skills you didn’t build
The sleep you didn’t get
The stretching and flexibility work you didn’t do
You probably won’t remember:
That extra intense interval at the very end because you felt great
Turning the rest up to 75% because it felt harder that makes you feel good
The extra spinning around for 45 minutes because you had to make it a century
The early FTP test which made your workouts mentally harder sooner than expected
Pros are pros because they do the work, recover better than anyone, and they stick to their plan. They do exactly the amount of work they are assigned and no more, because they need to recover and be fresh. There are so many off the bike opportunities to get faster that won’t require as much recovery that you can take advantage of, especially this time of year. So if you are itching to add something in, do some off the bike work instead and stick to your training plan.
I’ve also noticed that quite a few TR users seem to see FTP and/or TR time as the end all be all of cycling. Easy to do when you live and breathe indoor training and test every 4-6 weeks.
I train indoors to prep for racing because the weather where I live sucks in the winter. I like riding my bike, not measuring myself on a trainer. This makes it easy to keep it as a means, not an end…
(This is perhaps the one thing which got me into this mindset in the first place — forgettibg the end goal. I’m kind of in no man’s land right now, equidistant from my last and next A race, so much so that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to actually race and habituated myself into a trainer “racer”. This recovery week will be a good time to revisit the mental game.)
I’m relatively new to cycling and know that I should spend a good amount of time just getting a comfortable amount of work into my legs. There is still that nagging thought in the back of my head that I could push harder and make the high volume plans workout.
Maybe I would survive the 600+TSS/week for 16 or 28 weeks… but the right thing for my long term enjoyment of cycling probably is to just go ahead and get a year of consistent 400-500 TSS in me and see where that takes my fitness.
Maybe. Maybe not. But, I can say from experience raising TSS just to raise TSS (while has some benefits for sure) is not the way to do it. Increasing TSS arbitrarily across training blocks without considering time training the three systems will leave you flat. The time to experiment with increasing TSS is more in the aerobic/base phase. xxx TSS of z2 is way different than accumulating the same TSS of threshold, VO2, anaerobic work. Be careful especially if you have limited history, older, have kids/career. If a deep history of riding/training, younger, trust funder/retired, no kids/so you can get away with more
