Hi all, I’ve got a mid plan half Monty coming up next week. I pushed it hard the last two weeks, and my long 170km ride today (Saturday) was harder than I expected. Ended up riding at tempo.
I’ve been training to do back to back long hard days, but the 2 hour hard intervals on Thursday are taking their toll, and I’m trying to work out what the best approach is for both the immediate goal of SUFFERING LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW next Thursday… And the long term goal of being able to double down and do a hard ride the second day.
My question is… Am I better off doing 3 hours of the new recovery rides around 65% ftp tomorrow OR do I just pull my head in, do some stretches and actually take it easy until primers (Wednesday) followed by half Monty on Thursday?
It’s up to you. It also depends on your general fitness and how quickly you can recover. Thursday is still a long way off yet. Another hard-ish day Saturday would still leave Sunday, Monday and Tuesday before primers which, for me, is adequate recovery from most rides.
Nah it’s Saturday night here and I’m planning for Sunday morning. So it’s two days recovery and then primers the third day. Just feeling particularly wrecked after this week… So trying to work out if there’s an actual benefit to doing recovery ride tomo, neutral - or will it compromise?
HM doesn’t need as much rest as FF. There’s also some benefit to doing HM or FF in a somewhat fatigued state. Namely that most of your training will occur while you are carrying a bit of fatigue. But of course you don’t want to do them while totally knackered either.
If you are tracking your fitness on TrainingPeaks, consider doing HM or FF with a TSB of -10 to +10, where -10 is slightly fatigued and +10 is fully tapered for event day.
In this episode we learn about the foolishness of more, more, more.
My question to you is, what are your actual goals? If it is to improve fitness, performance, and speed, then I would recommend following a SYSTM Training Plan that aligns with your actual race goals, or working with a Wahoo Coach to help build you a Customized Training Plan.
In the near term, I recommend a rest day, followed by Primers and then test. Good luck mate!
Thanks Corey, I can’t remember what I ended up doing at that time. In general I’m prone to overtraining - basically I love digging down in the suffering pits of hell and happy to keep flogging myself for far longer that I should. Something I’ve had to learn the hard way. I’m getting better at identifying it, but it’ll probably always be a work in progress for me.
I have tried one of the custom Wahoo plans, however it wasn’t a good fit for me. I did provide a lot of detailed feedback to Rupert at the time, but to boil it down:
Coach Spencer was great - really enjoyed interacting with him, and the calls with him were really useful / productive / helpful.
The insights from how he tweaked my existing routines was useful.
My issue was that there’s almost no feedback during the process. For example - you leave a bunch of notes on how the ride went / RPE / etc etc etc, but you don’t get any feedback on any of your activities, unless it’s in one of the scheduled video calls.
Similarly the program is not setup to provide feedback to adhoc questions. “Hey I’ve got 9 Hammers scheduled tomorrow but I’m feeling a bit ordinary | totally awesome | whatever, how should I tweak my ride based upon this?”. Or - “I did Kitchen Sink today, pushed it really hard and am totally exhausted now” → what modifications should you make to your scheduled program in the following days, to respond to how you rode today?
These are structural issues with the program - it’s simply not designed for this type of interaction. I realise that there’s an option to purchase additional Zoom calls, but that gets really expensive really quickly.
So for the athlete - you need to work out what kind of Coaching experience you want - and make your decision based on that. I don’t regret trying it at all - it was a good experience, but it wasn’t the right fit for me.
I am currently working with a coach who works with the “High touch” model, and that’s been a really useful / helpful experience so far.
As for the question around goals? I have general goals around fitness / performance / speed; in addition there’s an event that I hope will run in Australia in early December (Drops & Hoods) - 270Km / 5000m road race. I’m OK with the distance & altitude, I’m hoping to get a good time in the race. So currently planning training around that event… assuming it’ll go ahead. If it doesn’t, then I’ll work out what the next event of similar difficulty is and adjust accordingly.
I will have a poke at the podcast, always happy to learn more. I’ve been getting a lot into learning about adaptations & physiology around endurance events, how do you target the desired adaptations etc.
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