Workout triage
General qeuestion about long ride workout triage...
For whatever reason, my traiing hasn't been quite as ideally as I would like recently. Kind of up and down. Maybe I should have taken a longer break after my first A-race. Maybe an eextremely busy time at work has meant more stress and less rest. Maybe it's just the luck of the draw.
In any case, my long run on Thursday (ended up being about 2:10) took more out of me than I'm used to, particularly my quads.
After I got out on my ride today, it became clear that the ~50 minutes of FTP and gobs of ABP just wasn't going to happen in aero. It was literally uncomfortable/painful to my quads to try to pedal that hard.
My solution today was to sit up on the bike (basically riding it like a road bike). I wasn't doing additional damage to the quads (just enough change in position to relieve that), and I could push the target watts. My feeling was that there wasn't anything to be gained by riding 3 hours pushing the quads deeper into a hole and I would certainly fail at the workout as written...so it was going to be this "road bike" ride or be a pretty pathetically low power ride in the bars. I know it's easier to push watts in the road position, but I felt like at least I got the work in, got some training in on some part of my legs, and didn't hurt myself further.
I know how to ride steady and i know how to ride in the bars.
I know this isn't ideal, but was it right? Whaddya think?
Comments
FWIW, I do most of my training on a road bike. Lots of climbing and ABP riding. I only ride my P3 like 25% of the time, but that riding is probably 90% in the bars. Probably the wrong move, but I may be a roadie at heart....
You got the work done, it just wasn't in the aero position — IMO, the only thing you didn't get from the workout was positional fitness. Whether this matters right now obviously depends on when your next race is.
Perhaps you need to ease up a bit to recover better?
Isn't this when your fatigue is supposed to be at a maximum?
If so, your taper may solve the problem.
Although I keep thinking about showing up at the start overtrained vs overrested
Perhaps some WSMs will chime in?
You also might have just taken the day off cuz it sounds like you need some rest
You could have cut the ride short and just rode EZ, sort of like a run the day after an interval session . It will help with recovery , having just an easy ride does lots for recovery and mitochondrial density.
As it turns out, I think thinks worked out pretty well. Perhaps because of a fortuitous improvement of the weather, I had a very good ABP ride and run today.. ABP totally in the bars and totally at goal watts. Same with the run...about 5 minutes of warmup and 25 min right around MP.
I've found myself in a similar place this weekend, 10 weeks before "A" race IM and 3 weeks before B/C race IM. To prove to myself I was ready for the B effort, I did Thursday's run as 140 minutes, with the usual pushes mid run. Temps were warm for us, mid 70s sun. Like Wm, I found myself still recovering by the weekend. On Saturday, the long bike FTP intervals weren't going to happen, so I switched to 30 minute intervals @ 0.75 IF, with 2-5 minutes easy recoveries. By 3 hours, I decided not to do the final 40 minute loop, and ended up with 3:15 of riding, only 150 TSS instead of my usual 180-200 for this ride.
Today, sunny and hot (90), and our first (and maybe only) lake swim of the season was in order. It felt good, but a 3 hour ride in the afternoon was absolutely not going to happen. So I decided to just switch Monday's run interval's into this PM, and do the ABP ride tomorow AM.
I felt myself teetering on the edge of over work, getting cranky, losing a little weight, so getting in the steady state, shorter ride and switching away from the back-to-back bike days seems to have perked me up a bit.
Ya gotta play it by ear every day at this stage of IM training - it's a very fine line between getting a good training effect and ending up trashed and losing 3-5 days out of the plan.
I can be flexible to a degree on mixing things around during the week, but the long stuff is pretty much stuck on the weekends. I have a very tight schedule and it changes every few weeks/months due to kids' schedules.
The thing I fear even more than a few days' fatigue is that I have burned my quads so hard that they take weeks to recover, even if I don't feel otherwise fatigued. I really don't know what the technical injury is but i know I can drive myself into it through overdoing it. That's one reason I was so pleased today...no sign of that after what might have happened if I had pushed too much in the aero yesterday.
Ice and foam roller. even when you think you're over it.
And, don't stress too much over the tweaks to the riding. It is unrealistic to think that we will nail every prescribed workout to the T.
I would have to think that you're ability to hit the start line healthy far, FAR, outweighs your concerns for road position watts vs tri position watts.
As an outside observer, it sounds alot like the IM+Life Grind taking it's toll on ya. You know the drill. This is what makes our journey so very hard when you compare it to the few that can eliminate practically all else besides IM training and recovery. It's a delicate balance. You know what to look out for.
We don't call you WSM for nuttin'!
Hang in there. ( Ice and foam roller, and cold baths, even you think it's long gone )
Then when doing ABP rides or after the intervals, switch to aero. Use this time to build TSS and get aero comfy. Did I misinterpret or mis-'hear' what I thought I heard? In general, should I be pushing my intervals while in aero? I know that was necessarily stated in the comments above, but it seemed to be inferred.
So that was the essential question I had to deal with initially: do a workout that I knew would be crappy (and perhaps dig me a hole) in the bars or do a less specific workout sitting up.
If you do your outseason sitting up (e.g., on a road bike), you will end up with an FTP that's reflective of your road bike position. When you go down to your TT bike, it will drop somewhat. Over a couple weeks you'll get some of that back as you train up the last little muscle that's different, but for most people, there is a permanent difference between the two. One of the compromises you make with your aero fit is how aero vs relaxed you can get and how much power penalty you pay in too extreme an aero position.
Hmmm - I'm about 8 weeks out from Augusta, so I guess I will be doing the rest of my intervals and "work" in aero. Good to know. That is, unless I feel like crap - in which case I will sit up.
Thanks, guys!!