I think I fried myself
I put this in General then deleted it because I thought it belonged here more, apologies
Ok, I thought I would throw this out here and see what others have done to recover. Forgive the newb for reqpeat questions, great site and lots of good information. I did search for overtraining and have found some threads and have come to the conclusion that I need to take a step back and recover. I've ridden, ran and swam a lot for my body in the past couple of months and felt strong for a long time but now I've lost my mojo and can't seem to get it back so I want to see what you folks do to get your legs under you again.
As an aside, I was at 12-15 hours of training for quite a few weeks in a row and it has caught up to me. I've taken a day off here or there to get something back but at this point my "slow" runs are taxing and I just want them over with. There's no feeling fresh after a warm up and my HR is 10-15 beats higher than it normally is even for this horrible heat Atlanta's having. I ran the peachtree and my HR was in Zone 4 running Zone 1 pace if that tells you anything. I took 3 days off and then raced again last Sunday, you can guess what happened 
. This has gone on for going on 3 weeks now, just don't feel strong ever even after toning it back
So this is my choice, I'm going to take this coming weekend and the following week off, for you on a recovery week does this mean
1. you do ABSOLUTELY nothing?? No rides, runs or swims? Or
2. do you maybe do one or two REALLY easy (ZN1 no matter how slow) just to get the legs to move or something?
I'm looking forward to getting back to myself and getting on with an EN program that gets me to REV3 Anderson ready to go
BTW, I did go to the doctor about all this and checked out ok including bloodwork.
Comments
The net is that you don't loose fitness very quickly, so you need to stand down and do very little to nothing until you recover.
From what you say, I do do nothing workout related and just reat big time focusing on making sure you are fueled correctly and have enough sleep.
BTW, it's one of the toughest things in our sport is to recognise that doing nothing will have the biggest positive impact on your future races.
For me, it depends on how big a fatigue-hole I have dug myself into. I do nothing (except stretching) until I feel hungry again for training.
Also, read this post by Coach P on this very topic. http://members.endurancenation.us/Training/TrainingForums/tabid/101/aft/9255/Default.aspx
Good luck.