So, what now?

  After spending 4 years trying to rediscover my cycling youth….

   …I’ve found it, sort of.  The big question now is – how do I hang on to it!!!

  Okay, the megaloblastic anaemia thingy pretty much kept the brakes on for 2 or 3 years so those early ‘comeback’ seasons seem a bit irrelevant now but I don’t suppose it was wasted effort really. All miles in the bank.

  The dilemma I have is that I’d like to keep this level of fitness / health for the rest of the season but I’m now worried about either overdoing it and ruining it all again or not doing enough and detraining.  If I was going to cock it up though, I think the latter option is the most favourable one – recent experience has proved that taking big chunks of time off the bike isn’t actually as disastrous as you’d be led to believe. In fact, for me at least, it seems to work miracles.

  I rode a TT on weds and felt great. Two days off then out again for a fast ride (‘Tempo’ is what they call it I think) today (sat) which I smashed once again. I rode a usual two hour route but based on recent rides, I put an extra loop in to lengthen it a bit - even so I was back in 1:54! Shouldn’t complain really I suppose!

  Felt amazing again once I’d warmed up and the Magnesium Citrate had kicked in, riding into a 12-15kt headwind in the big ring with ease.

  I made a point of tuning into myself as much as I could and noticed a few things:

·          Resting pulse – nothing remarkable when I woke up, just over 60. Not been especially low for a while. I’ve always used this as a marker for fatigue but I wonder now if it’s a bit of a red herring?

·          Possibly connected to the above but I was ‘tired’ when I got up. Not sore, achey sort of tired but a sort of ‘core’ tiredness that made me think twice about riding. In the end it wasn’t an issue as I had a great ride.  I’ve noticed a few times that days when you get up feeling awesome don’t always mean you are in for a fast bike ride and vice versa. There’s a subtle difference between an ‘overdoing-the-training’ type of tired and a ‘busy-at-work-on-your-feet-all-day’ type of tired.  It’s quite an important difference but I can’t think of a way of easily spotting it.

·          The perception of effort is quite a well documented feature of fitness / form / fatigue / overtraining. Again, once I’d warmed up I was using big gears easily and felt like a bit of a slacker sometimes because I felt I wasn’t ‘working’ but from the HR and speed & size of the gears I obviously was.

·          Rapid changes in HR. My heart rate is reacting like some sort of rev counter at the minute. What I mean is that when I pedal hard it increases rapidly and freely. When I stop at junctions / lights etc, it drops quickly, almost instantly. Take off again and it’s right back up there straight away. There’s no lag, no delay, it tracks my effort instantaneously.  I know that’s what it’s supposed to do but the way it’s doing it now is different!

  I’m aware that the long block of hard training and the enforced month long lay off due to illness is pretty much a classic overload / taper sort of cycle which may explain the ‘peak’ I’m experiencing.  But after a WHOLE MONTH off? Why haven’t I massively detrained? Or perhaps I have and there’s more to come? Dunno….

  I dabbled with periodised training a couple of years ago but didn’t really get a lot out of it because I was still handicapped by deformed red blood cells.  I did the classic 4 week programme – 3 weeks of increasing load then a really easy week repeated every 4 weeks.  What I did notice was that I’d have a minor ‘peak’ not in the first week after the rest week but in the second training week, ie about 7-14 days after the last day off. That’s kind of similar to what’s happened lately. Interesting.

  Unfortunately, I have a habit of turning everything I do into a scientific experiment but this has really got my attention now! As regards how much training to do to keep things going, I’m going to try for a couple of 2 hr tempo rides a week and try a TT every now and then. I’ll be particularly watching the points above, especially the ‘perceived effort’ and ‘rapid response HR’ ones as they’re the easiest ones to spot. If things start drifting back to how they were, I think that’ll be my body’s way of telling me I’m doing too much.

  As for monitoring if I’m doing enough, well, the TT performances should tell me that!

  Fingers crossed….