This is going to be somewhat long, and for that I apologize. Saturday (6/2) before last, I went out trying to make a break thru. I climbed several hills at the absolute most power I could manage, got my gold star, finished out another 50mi at a leisurely pace. Came home, and got a 6% boost in MPA and TP along with a slight drop in HIE. The effort colored my planned into the yellow for the next week, so after taking sunday off, I filled the rest of mon-fri with Lucy in the sky 95/100, which is basically 2 hours worth of riding @ LTP. The plan was to try for another breakthru ride the next sat (I got the impression that I should aim for a breakthru a week). Mon-Wed went great, but on thursday the workout started getting rather hard. On friday I was barely managing to pedal 10min @LTP before needing to free spin a bit. Saturday morning took me about 2 minutes to realize that I was not going to be making any kind of breakthru at all. I went 20mi out at way below LTP, and then cursed myself for having gone out that far, the return leg felt absolutely brutal, despite very mode st speed and power. I took sunday off and rested. By monday morning I should have been in the blue, as in fresh, with the form score going back into the positive (it could be that I don’t really understand what the form score means and over relying on the colors). I hopped on the bike and very quickly realized that I was anything but fresh, I could barely pedal, and no matter how hard I tried I could not raise my HR above 140 (this tends to happen to me when I’m over worked, or did not get enough rest. My max is a touch over 180, although I can almost never reach that, but I get into the high 170’s during hard workouts, and into the 160’s during more typical workouts. My averages for rides are typically 140’s to 150’s) . Feeling very discouraged, I turned back and took another 2 days off, wondering if perhaps some error had the system over estimate my TP at expense of HIE because I did the break thru on hills, and so would quick pedaling so hard when I reached the top. This morning I jumped on the bike again, and this time felt great, hitting most of my power targets despite a harder workout (although the XSS cost for my workout is always lower than predicted, I’m guessing that’s because the world has downhills). Of course, I’m not hopelessly behind on my XSS deficit and may have to rework my goals, but what I’m really interested in is schedule my workouts in such a way as to avoid this wall of nothingness that takes several days to recover from. It’s hard to do that when the form score and color does not seem to reflect how I’m actually feeling (or I don’t interpret it correctly). It may not be possible for me to maintain an aggressive goal plan (for which I have to do long rides 6 days out of the week) and it certainly doesn’t appear possible to try for weekly breakthrus because of the recovery demands.
The way I see it is that either the signature is screwed up (seems the least likely, if only because the effect seems to be too large for the possible error), or I’m completely misreading the form score and color (hey I misunderstood my way at almost everything else here) or that the rate at which form score recovers doesn’t reflect what is actually happening to me (my recovery rate is slower than predicted). The last one seems somewhat likely, since, as I understand it, the form score isn’t measured, but is rather just calculated based on the work out strain and other factors. Could someone help me out as to where to go from here?
The Xert engine can’t take into account natural individual recovery rates and other factors that determine how quickly/slowly one recovers (rest, stress, nutrition, etc.)…this is AI that we’d love to implement but that capability is down the road. But what it does do is look at your training loads, the make-up of those training load (hi/med/lo), and your ramp rate to indicate whether or not the rider should be tired or fresh. In your case your TL has been climbing steadily since Feb so you could in fact be seeing a bit of mid-season burn out; we’re working on an article on that very subject right now. If you’re still feeling tired you could a) take a week off (as many pros do this time of year), or b) dial down your Improvement Rate a notch or two for a week to gain some extra recovery.
Jamie, Thanks for the reply.