I can ride again -- now what?

Hooray! After approximately 8 weeks off due to a head injury I can finally return to training. Quick back story: I'm a master's age Cat. 3 in my second year of returning to racing after a 10 year break (sound familiar?). I trained all winter long with a program of mostly upper-endurance-range (upper-l2) rides and so-called strength endurance intervals (which I now question as to their effectiveness thanks to this forum). I was starting to do some threshold work when the accident occured (please watch out for dogs). I started riding very easily on the rollers two weeks ago and slowly built up to doing maximal efforts on the road this past weekend. This was necessary to make sure that I could handle training again. The good news is that I can, but I really wonder what I should do now, now that the racing season is in full swing and I'm here without a hammer, so to speak?

Some friends have recommended I do nothing but l2 rides for a month, but is this really necessary? Maybe I'm being unrealistic, but I'd like to race some crits by the end of May and I doubt I'd able to hang if that's all I did. I don't care if I have to sacrifice hilly road-race performance this year in order to be competitive in criteriums. I've never really done well in RRs anyway (something I'd like to address someday but not a priority now). Would I be better off doing SST work? l4 - threshold work?

To summarize:
*5 weeks until Memorial Day crits I'd like to enter (Cat. 3 and/or Masters)
*Priority races for the year are crits under 2 hours in length (Superweek) and mostly 1 hour or less
*It's been 9 weeks since I could train heavily, but I've been riding a little the past two weeks
*Can train 5 days a week
*don't have a PM, yet
*willing to sacrifice road race performance if necessary this year

Thanks!

That would be my advice. Start with SST work for a week or two and work into L4 work if that goes well. Rebuild your base with work in those zones and maybe a longer L3 ride or two per week but I wouldn't schedule any L2 workoouts, just use L1 and L2 for warmups, cooldowns, resting between intervals and such. If that goes well you can add some L5 and higher work after a month or two.

Good luck,
Dave

Thanks, that seems to make sense. I did an uphill test yesterday and was about 5% slower (ran the numbers through analyticcycling to help estimate) than the last test I did before the accident. That's actually better than I expected so I'm encouraged. Maybe it won't take the rest of the year to gain back what I lost.

Also I noticed what I called l2 in my first post is actually low-l3 in the Coggan definition (LTHR based, which wouldn't correspond exactly to power, naturally). It seems that every coach has a different definition of the ranges -- are you sure you guys are all using the same standard?

That's good news!

I can't speak for all the other folks on the forums but I'm definitely talking about Coggan's power levels and wouldn't schedule any workouts at or below L2 for your stated target events. Realistically I only schedule L1 if I feel like on the bike rest to stay loose and only plan to do a complete L2 ride if I'm going out for more than four hours or more likely going on a social ride just for the fun of it. Everything in the weekly schedule is L3 or above and those L3 rides often have a 20 minute L4 or SST interval buried in the middle somewhere if I go looking for it.

I still get plenty of L1 and L2 work as warm ups, cool downs, rests between intervals and just getting around with traffic and such but I don't have any days in my calendar dialed in as L2 specific workouts. And I'm doing road races as well as crits on that schedule. I definitely wouldn't expect a late season comeback prepping for crits based on a lot of L2 work. If you're only 5% off your preaccident fitness you should be able to start back with high L3 and SST work and get into L4 within a couple of weeks.

Good luck, keep us posted on your comeback trail.....
-Dave

So far, so good, Dave. I've done SST for about two weeks now and can see some improvements, naturally enough. However, I find I feel too fatigued to do SST two days in a row. I can do it -- I had to while traveling last week -- but would rather not. I want to be careful to not overdo it.

edited to add: Actually, what's going on is that I need about 24 hours to recover before I feel like going at it again.

Cool, sounds like you're listening to your body which is really smart. I'm a strong believer in working from high to low intensity during my training blocks so one trick during back to back SST is to do the first day near the mid to high end (90-94% of FTP) and follow it up with a high L3/SST day (85-88% of FTP) that's easier for me mentally and physically and still gets me some good back to back SST. You might try that as your recovery improves.

-Dave