Hey all - just curious everyone’s take on this.
I’ve noticed a pattern where I go out and crush a Saturday long endurance ride 2+ hours, feel great… but then my legs just feel terribly flat and weak on the Sunday ride, still enjoy getting out but def feeling fatigued and can’t do much over 90 minutes without mentally burning out.
Any ideas or thoughts as to why that is and/or advice on how to improve that aspect of my fitness?
The question that comes to my mind is, are you definitely riding in zone 2 on the first day? Ideally, those rides shouldn’t add much fatigue. If you are keeping it easy and still struggling, maybe it’s a problem of trying to increase volume too quickly. I heard somewhere that a good rule of thumb is to increase weekly volume by about 10% at a time. That means that sometimes I have to start a high-volume plan reducing the length of the endurance rides and building up slowly.
One more thought: are you eating enough carbs before, during, and after your Saturday ride to be ready for the next day? Your mention of mental burnout along with physical fatigue makes me wonder if you’re not getting adequate nutrition.
I’ve thought about whether or not it’s Z2 and I’m fairly confident I’m keeping it in that zone, but of course could be wrong. It definitely feels like an effort I could hold all day and my HR falls right into that zone based on the various theories.
I think adding too much volume too quickly sounds like the likely culprit and definitely need to re-examine carb intake. Thanks for the reply!
You can ride Zone 3 and some Zone 4 all day and not feel it until the next day. You have to look at each segment and make absolutely suee to stay in Zone 2 both heart rate and power wise. Garmin said i did a recovery effort, but not with the actual numbers.
In the past I have split plans in half: I will start the plan as a medium volume, run it for 4-6 weeks, then delete the rest of the medium volume plan and substitute in the high-volume version with the same end date.
This helped me build up to doing a couple of centuries last year when I didn’t really have the baseline miles to launch straight into a high-volume plan in the spring.
And yeah, watch those Z2 rides on the road. I usually find when I go back and look at my data that I had significant spurts into Z3/Z4 (hills, stop/starts, etc.) that added up over time. Hey, I’m an Attacker - what can I say?
Protein and carb drink within half an hour of finishing and a really good quality meal no more than a couple of hours later and then a good night’s sleep!
A good breakfast of carbs and protein before heading out again.
Hydrate before, during and after with WATER🤣