Too fit for February?

[fezzy]

I have about a year and change of pretty solid training under my belt. Last year was my first year racing. I made decent progress, but wasn't at all consistent. This year, I have been more methodical in my training, and have seen my power numbers rising rapidly recently. I think the gains are coming for several reasons. One, having the year in my legs I think has allowed me to recover much better, and having been through the previous winter of training, Im much stronger mentally in terms of completing workouts. Plus rollers are much more pleasant than my old stationary trainer.

So here I am in late February with numbers about 15-20 watts higher than I was able to push at peak last year, and doing them more consistently. Is there any reason to hold back the gains when they seem to be there for the taking, and I have the motivation or should I take what I can get when I can get it? I know there is a long season ahead, and dont want to burn out, but have no idea how much more there is in the well. Is the only way to find the limit by exceeding it?

I was competitive early in the year last year, but not so much later in the year, so I know I need to be stronger than I was last year to reach my goals.

 

[daveryanwyoming]

... Is there any reason to hold back the gains when they seem to be there for the taking, and I have the motivation or should I take what I can get when I can get it? I know there is a long season ahead, and dont want to burn out, but have no idea how much more there is in the well. ....

Load management, especially as it relates to psychology and motivation is always a challenge. But there's no inherent reason that you'll peak early or burn out assuming you continually and steadily build your training load. That generally means sticking with sustainable work and not doing high level short intervals in February.

It's another reason why SST work is a better long term bet than HIT work or only doing L4 workouts like a steady diet of 2x20s. It's not as daunting to get on the bike to do SST/Tempo work day after day with a couple of harder days during the week. It's both physically and mentally more challenging to only do the high end work and to keep increasing overall load (CTL) throughout the season.

The other thing to consider is your available weekly training time. If you've maxed that out in February (warm climate or dedicated gym trainer drone) then where do you take that later in the year as important events approach. Ideally you'll steadily increase load and also make a shift to higher intensity as the season approaches. If you peak your CTL now and start dropping load with frequent racing or just due to time constraints you'll peak during winter/spring training and if you introduce high end work too soon or too much of it you'll both lose weekly CTL and risk getting fried mentally from the hard efforts.

The basic peaking principle in terms of CTL is that your body will continue to adapt to slowly moving fitness targets as long as the training load slowly increases. Sure the makeup of workouts is very important but you've got to slowly and continually raise the bar or your body has no reason to continue adapting. When you eventually plateau in terms of load and or intensity and then start the inevitable CTL downslope your body starts recovering relative to recent adaptations and in time you start detraining as the body now adapts to the new lower overall load.

So basically you want to plan your overall load and your weekly intensity to keep the bar moving up until you're ready to peak for important events. And then road racers with long seasons typically need a mid season break from racing and a regroup, rebuild period before finishing out the season. It's just really hard to continually build load (positive CTL slope) while racing frequently from a solid winter/spring base. Get into an extended CTL bleed and eventually you'll run out of steam and that's often when late season burnout hits a racer, results suffer and racing stops being fun.

Seeing increased fitness in February is not a problem in and of itself. But definitely figure out a way to track and plan your overall training load and make sure you can stay on a build in terms of overall load until you're ready to start spending base in peaking cycles. And then pay attention to overall load and plan a mid season regroup period or two where you stop racing a bit get some brief recovery and rebuild load prior to late season events.

All of that takes a way to visualize and quantify training load and a way to plan load relative to available training time and intensity of individual workouts. The Performance Manager in WKO+ is just such a tool and very useful in terms of tracking load and avoiding random performance peaks or overload and burnout.

Good luck,
-Dave