My recent training schedule showing reduced mileage. The last column labelled “ave min/wk” is my minutes per week averaged over the last year. My heart broke when that sank below 300. Note that the last time I rode my 33 mile "New Alpine-Cañada" ride was on 6/30/2021.
Four months ago, I posted "One change I am making, at least for the moment, is to ride a bit less in general and to relax what had been my fierce determination to ride at least 300 minutes a week and at least 4 rides a week." That decision was based on my tentative conclusion that my declining performance was due to an accumulation of fatigue, that my previous training schedule produced more load than my body could tolerate. How did that go? In short, the jury is still out, but I did learn enough that I thought it was worth an update.
Let me start by acknowledging an elephant in the room. I am a very bad patient of my medical care team, missing many office visits and diagnostic screenings. Thus, my poor performance could well be due to an illness that has not been diagnosed due to this negligence. However, I have nothing useful to say about that at this juncture, if I ever drag my negligent ass to the doctor, I will tell you what I find out. Short of that, if not an illness, what is it that is holding back my performance?
“What is holding back my performance” might be a combination of things, so the following list should not be seen as exclusive, a mixture of them might be the culprit. That said, here is my list:
- Because of the hills where I live, I might be training harder than I think I am and thus training too hard.
- Instead, the opposite might be true; I might be giving up too quickly and not training hard enough.
- My performance might not actually be decreasing, or perhaps not as much as I think. What I am looking at might just be normal variation.
- Maybe I am just getting older.
My latest training was designed to both test and respond to possibility 1, the hypothesis that I have been training too hard. The changes I made were 1) to stop riding my longest ride, a 33 mile/160 minute ride with 1,600 feet of climbing and 2) to listen to my body and either not ride or do easier rides when my legs feel tired, even if that means failing to reach my previous goal of 300 minutes of cycling each week. I do confess that letting go of the 300 minute a week minimum for minutes per week of cycling has been both heartbreaking and discouraging but the logic for doing so is that the hills around my new home make my average ride closer to the vigorous intensity aerobic exercise of the Medical Community than to the moderate intensity I had been assuming so that what I should be shooting for, now that I am riding from my new home, is a minimum of 150 minutes a week.
Earlier, I had made a third change, not in response to this latest slump, but one which is helping me respond to it. That change is to set up my trainer in my bedroom. When I first moved into my new home I noted that finding an easy ride was difficult. My first solution was riding laps around a local recreational lake, a ride I call the Lake Loop. Although that ride is easier than some of my other rides, getting to and from there still involved some significant hills. Looking back at my training log I noted that I rode my last Lake Loop ride on December 1 of 2020 and my first Trainer ride on December 11. Thereafter, 30 minutes on my trainer (boredom prevents anything longer) has replaced 60 minutes of laps around the Lake as my easy ride. These new easy rides are much easier and thus have much less risk of contributing to overtraining.
How is my new, easier schedule working? It is probably too soon to tell, at least with any certainty, but one preliminary data point suggests that overtraining was at least a factor in my recent slump. I first noticed this slump in May of this year when I could not complete the training plan I had devised to prepare to ride the Art of Survival Metric Century. (I will comment on the wisdom of that training plan later in this post.) After taking it a bit easier during June, July, and August, my times on my benchmark Alpine-Like rides increased from below average to just above average in September. In October, an out of town trip and a cold severe enough to keep me off the bike meant I had too few Alpine-Like rides to judge, so I have no confirmation of that improvement. A warning against overinterpreting this one good month comes from the fact that I also had a good month the previous April for no reason I can fathom. Was April a statistical outlier? If so, could September be one also? It definitely could, which is why my caution in coming to a conclusion, but I did find my September results encouraging.
What should I do now?
- Confirm that by reducing my riding I am improving my performance.
- Continue at a reduced level of riding until my accumulated fatigue is gone.
- Develop a schedule I can maintain from my current home.
- Develop a schedule to prepare for metric centuries.
I have been giving some thought to item 4. Some time ago I devoted a whole post to working from a schedule given in “Distance Cycling” by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach to allow riding a century or 200K "every month of the year” and modifying it for a metric century a month, taking into account the rides I can actually do here in the hills of California. One step in that conversion was to increase the mileages I initially calculated to make sure I maintained 300 minutes a week of riding. Now that I am questioning that number, it may be time to reconsider those increases and similarly for the somewhat different schedule to get ready for the first metric century of the season. When I looked back on the actual preparation I had done for metric centuries in the past, it was less than I had remembered and less than the plan I had so laboriously developed, another reason for cutting back a bit on my metric century preparation schedule. Of course, if my recent problems preparing for a metric century resulted from illness or old age, then none of this will be effective. Back when I reviewed my last 40,000 miles of riding, I considered a more general version of that possibility and I asked the following question: "Will the Zombie make it to 50,000 miles, and if he does, what cycling adventures will he have enjoyed?" Stay tuned to find out.
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