What am I doing wrong?

[Randyforriding]

I'm 58, going on 59. I work nights at a job that requires me to stand for eight hours, and do a fair amount of lifting, so when I get home I don't have the time or energy to put in a lot of miles during the work week. To compensate, I do a lot of shorter, more intense workouts in the form of hill repeats.
I have thursday and friday nights off, and do a club ride on Saturday morning. Though friday would be the logical choice for doing a long hard ride, I ususally take it pretty easy so I'm fresh for the Saturday club ride. The club rides are usually under 40 miles, but often pretty competitive.
Here's my problem and question. Seems like if I do a couple hard interval/hill workouts, even if they are early in the week, I don't perform well on the club ride. I try to take in some protein and carbs right after my workout, but I just don't seem to be recovering. Seems like, even at my age, three or four days should be enough to recover. Any thoughts on what I shoud be doing differently?
Randy

 

[jhuskey]

Please be more specific where you think believe you are lacking in form as in climbing, going with a break, overall endurance etc. Also what is your present weight and do you have a good road bike that is well fitted to you?

 

[vspa]

Your kind of job, standing and lifting, might be a factor, an important one. Unfortunately the body needs rest to recover and to benefit from training. I would do the hill intervals on tuesday, the rest of the days doing tempo. So you will have two hard days during the week: interval training and the club ride. Anyway you are quite motivated for a mature and working-busy individual, so i don't think that you are doing anything wrong, quite the contrary,

 

[Randyforriding]

Originally Posted by jhuskey .

Please be more specific where you think believe you are lacking in form as in climbing, going with a break, overall endurance etc. Also what is your present weight and do you have a good road bike that is well fitted to you?

I guess the thing is, I'm very inconsistent. One week, I'm the one pushing the pace. The next, I'm getting dropped. It seems like the weeks I'm weak are when I've done a couple hard interval days early in the week. Like Monday and Wednesday. I'd like to see more consistency, that is, consistently strong. The club rides are usually in the rolling country just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills (Boulder County). I've got two good bikes that I feel pretty comfortable on. I've been riding long enough that I can get a bike dialed in fairly quickly now. Maybe VSPA is right that one interval day might be good, but two is just too many. Or longer, slower intervals.
Randy

 

[dhk2]

Randy, believe you're going too hard on your hill interval days. Do you monitor your HR and/or power, or just go all out? If you're killing yourself with hard workouts on Monday and Wednesday, doubt you can be recovered for Sat AM club riding. You're near 60, and have a physical job. You just can't train like a guy in his 20's and 30's. If you're riding the club ride like it's a 3 hr road race, that's more than enough hard training for the week for a guy your age who's just riding for fun and fitness.

Suggest you start by dropping the interval rides altogether for now. During the week, just ride comfortably but don't push the pace. Good to take Thurs off, but maybe a short "leg-opener" ride on Friday, easy hour or less, would help. It will be hard to ride easy on your own, if you're used to constantly pushing the pace. You might need to use an HRM as a "speed limiter" for your easy rides. See what happens on the Sat club rides after a couple weeks.....bet you'll like the results.

 

[daveryanwyoming]

Originally Posted by Randyforriding .

.... One week, I'm the one pushing the pace. The next, I'm getting dropped. It seems like the weeks I'm weak are when I've done a couple hard interval days early in the week. Like Monday and Wednesday. I'd like to see more consistency, that is, consistently strong. ..

Your results aren't too surprising if you're chasing quick fitness with short hard intervals. I don't know what intensity you're doing your hill repeats or how long those hills are, but it sounds like you're basically in a HIIT style peaking cycle, IOW, you do hard and short hill repeats one week and carry a lot of fatigue into your weekend group ride. Those weeks aren't your best from a performance standpoint but you do get a fair amount of training on those weeks. Then on other weeks you go easier or miss some of the hard short intervals, you carry less fatigue into the weekend and it's those weeks you see the benefits of the harder weeks and have a good weekend ride.

I've used almost exactly that pattern with athletes that had setbacks before important parts of their season for instance coming into cyclocross season after a summer injury that cost them base and training. We'll try to plan our hard loading weeks prior to non-racing weekends or less important cross races and then back off a bit to take additional freshness into their targeted more important events. It can work but it's basically running on fumes as it's not really a sustainable approach to fitness. It's a bit of a viscous cycle and not a great long term approach to training.

Maybe you're doing longer more sustained hill repeats on 20 to 40 minute climbs, living in Boulder you've definitely got some of those to choose from. But if not you should try backing off the intensity of your harder 'hill repeat' days and do sustained efforts in the 20 to 60 minute range that get you breathing deeply and steadily and require focus but are not brutal or that leave you gasping. IOW, for folks training with power do Tempo/SST/Threshold work in sustained blocks in the 15 to 45 minute range or even longer. If you want to be fresher on the weekends then lean those towards the Tempo end, if you want build sustainable power for future fitness then lean them towards the Threshold end. These are still pretty compact workouts as a good SST/L4 session can be performed in an hour to ninety minutes so we're not talking about all day Endurance paced riding. The key thing is sustained aerobic, yet mid to harder aerobic, efforts and not gut busting short intervals if you want to build sustainable power but not bury yourself so deeply that the weekend rides are a crapshoot from a fatigue and recovery standpoint.

Search these boards or the web in general on SST (Sweet Spot Training) for lot's of ideas of how to implement this mid intensity mid duration work to balance solid training with recovery so that you can do more of it. Frank Overton a coach in your neck of the woods has written quite a bit on the subject over at his FastCatCoaching website.

Of course the other part of the question is your longer term goals and whether it's more important to be the fast guy on group rides in December or if you want to be even faster yet for more important events during the season. That's up to you and your longer term goals but personally and with most of my clients we're training and laying down base this time of year and that means not bringing top form into hard team rides this time of year. But either way I wouldn't do short hard peaking intervals in December unless I was peaking for December events, again maybe you're not and your hill repeats are longer and ridden steadier than I'm assuming but the pattern you describe is pretty common with folks trying to cram fitness with short hard efforts and struggling to balance that kind of work with the fatigue it generates.

Good luck,
-Dave

 

[jhuskey]

Ok , consistency, well you know how it is with us....experienced guys. What you use to do all day takes all day to do. It could be you are not allowing enough time for recovery and really the only way to know for sure is to vary your routine a little and see how it works out.
It is also not a bad idea to get a medical checkup ,if you haven't done one in a while, and make sure your blood values are still normal and the old thyroid and such are firing consistently.
That being said I can still smoke a lot of 20 and 30 year olds but probably not all of them..

 

[An old Guy]

Originally Posted by Randyforriding .

when I get home I don't have the energy to put in a lot of miles

You are not recovering from your work night. I bet you don't take in protein or carbs after work. (I don't believe that eating after a workout or after work is useful.)

If the club rides are important to you, find a plan that allows you to perform on those days. That plan might be different than the plan that gets you stronger over time.

 

[scottz123]

I would search Joe Friels Blog

http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2012/09/the-aging-athlete-more-about-me.html

you could search his site using key words like "aging athlete fatigue"

You could email and ask him directly. He has answered me on questions.

[email protected]

 

[dominikk85]

how old are those other guys? I read that you are 58. if they are like 20-30 years younger it would be natural that you cannot keep up with them.

this is not meant as an insult. it is great that you keep yourself in shape and you are probably fitter than a lot of 20 yo couch potatoes. but when it comes to competing against well trained young guys I think you are naturally in a disadvantage. but keep the good work up and continue to train.

 

[Randyforriding]

Alll good advice, and I think you guys are spot on. Two intense workouts are just too much for and old geezer like me to recover from. I think I'll keep one hill workout a week, but change from a short, very steep hill, to a longer less steep hill. By the time I get to the top of the short, steep hill, I'm so deep in oxygen debt that my finger tips feel tingly. I'd like to try working in one long climb a week, though that is increaseingly hard with the colder weather coming in.
I think there may also be some health issue involved. I feel I'm not recovering as well as last year. A couple times I've been told I'm slightly anemic. I've recently started taking iron supplements. I'll see if that helps. Could also be low testosterone or thyroid levels. Then there's always EPO. Sure worked for Lance.

 

[dhk2]

Randy, if you're going to keep one hard hill workout a week, in addition to your hard Sat club ride, consider turning down the intensity. If your finish the climbs so out of breath that your fingers are getting tingly, that would indicate that you're doing a VO2 max effort, ie, hitting your max HR and breathing at RPE 10 for as long as you can hold it. That kind of effort sounds more like a "hillclimb test" than weekly training to me.

Even interval training is usually done at lower levels. Heart rate monitors and power meters are great tools for measuring and controlling intensity, and basic HRMs can be had for a reasonable price. Without these, you can still check your HR pretty easily by taking your pulse at the end of the interval......beats in 10 seconds times 6 is what I used to do.

Will defer to others with more training knowledge here, but I think it's important to manage your intensity during your routine workouts, rather than just going all-out. From what I've read, you get the same benefits with a lot less training stress and recovery issues. For us guys over 50 (I'm 15 yrs over that now) the recovery issues are even more difficult and important.

 

[Felt_Rider]

I am not going to chime in too much on the training aspect because other have already done so and Dave pretty much has it nailed. In fact in was Dave, RDO and the it's killing me thread that had me come to the crossroads of a big decision and that is more to what I want to say. Your post brings back a very vivid flashback of where I was at a few years ago riding with the group on Saturday's. I trained a little during the week, tried to rest up some and then be ready to participate with fairly mature cyclists that treated a 60 mile route like it was a short crit sprinting every hill. It was a vicious cycle as mentioned by Dave. Since I was burning a lot of matches in those rides it left me absolutely exhausted and unable to train in following days and then I felt a need to rest up before Saturday to hit it again and hope to survive. I did improve for a while, but then I started seeing a decline in performance and started getting dropped more instead of getting better.

What I am about to state I am not suggesting that you do. It is a personal choice and it was a very hard choice for me to make. In fact in took me more than a year to change from this cycle to a more structured routine over a period of a year (2010). I have evolved to actually training mostly solo this year now and really enjoy it.

Here is a look back at the transition with the change in direction coming in the year 2010. At the crossroad of decision that I wanted to improve more so than participating as a weekend warrior.

September 14, 2010 - Training Evolution - understanding the path to take, which was similar in relation to what you would see in the its killing me thread.

November 28, 2010 - Pursuit of Success - understanding that consitency is key

December 12, 2010 - Reflection of the Year - a reflection and seeing progress play out by training with a structured plan.

September 7, 2011 - Fall into Place - simply confirming November 28, 2010 thoughts

January 17, 2012 - Forward Thinking Training - finding structure that allows for consistency or considering those things that can be disruptive to consistent training

This all started because part of me wanted to continue riding with friends, but not being able to keep up with them and a part of me that wanted to improve regardless of group rides.

I understand where you are coming from on the sentiments of coming home feeling fatigued, but many of us feel that way. I don't stand and lift all day, but I do come home feeling stressed out and that stress makes me feel physically worn out, but the desire to improve rises above that feeling. My wife will often comment, "I don't know how you find the energy to come home and train with kind of intensity", but again the desire to improve rises above. To be honest after the first 10 minutes into the first interval I start feeling really good and when I am done I am actually feeling even better.

Many of us are also time crunched. Week day evenings I have about 90 minutes at maximum to train (60 minutes of actual interval time), but I trusted in what the guys here have stated that getting on a steady diet of 20 minute intervals works and it has worked for me compared to the old haphazard way that I used to train. One thing about this structure though it does leave me too fatigued to go out and hit those crit like group rides. I do ride with the group once in a while, but if I feel like it is going to hurt following days of training or interrupt the schedule I will drop off the back and ride the remaining miles at a lower intensity. I have improved enough now though that when I ride with them and I am fresh I can stay up front and pull them for many miles or I can sit in at an aerobic pace and watch their antics of sprinting hills and burning matches and just stay at my pace. So things have certainly improved for me on this path.

Is it for you? I don't know. It comes back to making a personal choice as to how you want to proceed and if you really want to improve. One thing is for sure is the phrase, "If you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you are getting." That phrase brought me to a point of making a tough choice, but I feel it was the right choice.

Best wishes
Jesse