A Midsummer Break

My man Juancho recently quoth,, "nothing sucks like a rest day," so I'm guessing the mid-summer heat and constant hammering since February has got nearly everyone feeling flat these days.

Everyone, that is, except Joel and Rob, the two sandbaggers I rode with yesterday. They're regulars at the Wednesday night ride I've been attending, and they seemed to be just beyond my fitness level, so I invited 'em for a hilly 40-miler yesterday, to sharpen myself a bit. Well, they ate my lunch, and let me tell you, it would have been steep and hot enough out there even if I had kept my lunch.

Even with the aid of legal dope (an espresso from the redoubtable Cushman Market baristas) and enough cool liquids to float an ocean liner, I struggled up the S-curves into Shutesbury (a hill I'm usually smart enough to ride downward). Yeah, it was hot and all, but it was just as hot for those guys. Weaving and wheezing around a bend and seeing your ride buddies nowhere in sight is enough to turn your esprit de corps into esprit de corpse. (No knock on them -- I'd've done the same if I could). My heart was pounding so hard in the melting heat, my carotid arteries seemed to be trying to burst out of my neck. You know -- the kind of pounding that makes you see flashes of light with every beat. Pure suffering.

By the time we hit the final flattish 15 miles, I was cooked -- literally. I sheepishly tucked in behind Joel, who bravely led the charge for home into relentless, baking head winds. If any local gals on the market want to know what his cheeks look like, I can offer a detailed description of their ripple-tude. Body was saying "Quit, quit, drop back, let them wait for you at the next intersection!" The only thing keeping me pummeling the cranks as the heat came off the pavement in shimmering waves to cook us dry like chicken breasts was pride, pure and simple. That, and telling myself it would feel worse to see them pulling away yet again than it would to just keep pushing. Suffice it to say, I stayed with them.

I spent that afternoon on the couch guzzling ice water and vitamin C, eyes glazed, body limp, consoling myself by getting lost in the heroics of that day's Tour stage. (Andy Shleck for the top of the podium in Paris, by the way.)

I think I'll take it easy this week. I've been noticing dwindling enthusiasm lately, and that's a bright red flag for overtraining. If nothing sucks like a rest day, I better find something to distract myself for seven of them. It's time to recharge.

My Unconscious is Smarter than I am

I always get a little depressed whenever I have to take a rest week. I guess when the red flags include physical tiredness, irritability, achey joints, and sluggish performance, it's not surprising that I feel a little moonish over the idea of cutting back on my favorite pastime.

Interesting; I had a dream a couple nights ago in which I had this urge to go swimming in a quiet pond in the wilderness. I felt the sparkling sunshine, the soothing water, and an unusally refreshed sensation as I thought about it. I went looking for this pond, but all I found was a beach where folks were body-surfing in tall crashing waves. I thought to myself, "That looks really great, and usually I'd choose that. But I'll hold out for that pond." Pretty clear message, right? Yin over yang for a little while. Body and mind need a break.

Yet soon after -- it was either that day or the next -- I did a very demanding running workout, only days after the hardest bike ride I've done this year. My body felt strong and eager to go, just as it usually does right before it starts declining.

Guess my unconscious has a better handle on my best interests than I do. For the next week, I'm taking it light.

Low on Matches

I’m burning out.

Well, technically, it’s not burnout – that’s a step beyond this. I guess they call this “over-reaching.” My legs are heavy. My motivation is low. I think about riding and I get that “Ugh” reaction, instead of my usual charge of energy.

It’s only my third year in the sport, but I’ve already been through this a few times. (In fact, I had a terrible case of overtraining a year and a half ago, and wrote a post about how to avoid it.) I’ve learned that the problem is equal parts physical and mental. I’ve been training for months for a goal event coming one week from today, and I’ve tapped both sides pretty deeply.

Physically, I’ve increased my distance and altitude numbers very dramatically in the last three or four weeks. I mostly enjoyed it, but then I went for a shorter, taper-style ride this weekend, and I felt like dirt. I practically fell asleep on the bike during the second half of the route. I’ve also had a resurgence of chondromalacia in the last week, probably related to the spike in intensity and duration. Finally, let's not forget that Mrs. V. and I also bought and moved into our first house last month. All life stressors are training stressors at some level.

Mentally, a different story. This is the first year I’ve been healthy this far into the spring, that I’ve been able to ride whenever I saw fit. Part of that is due to my more thorough winter training, a lot of time on rollers, on elliptical machines and in the squat rack, stretching, watching diet like a hawk, etc. I was determined to build up steadily this year, and I did well at that.

What I didn’t expect was to feel so unexcited just as the weather started to turn warm and sunny. The idea was to hit the spring hard. But here I am, fuzzy-headed in the mornings, only slightly interested in the Giro d’Italia (which is my favorite grand tour), and so on. I’ve been training scrupulously for five months, and my body and mind say I’m done, and done now. I’m going to have to find a way to fire them up for Memorial Day. It isn’t a race, but it’s a harder ride than I’ve ever done, and I want to enjoy it.

Then I'll rest, take some time off the bike, detrain a little, let my systems re-set. I always, without fail, worry about the fitness I'll lose -- fitness I paid for with precious hours and energy. And, without fail, I come back stronger and more excited than ever. Maybe not right away, but sooner than I think I will.

When I do, I'll settle on my next goal, to fire me up for the middle of the season.

How to Overtrain

It’s been quite a long time since the last post. I’m hoping to keep this blog alive, but I recently moved to a new part of the state and started a new job, and getting settled took more time and energy than I predicted.

I also increased my training load considerably after moving. I’ve written here about the much more numerous and serious hills in my new location; in addition to riding much more vertically, between mid-August and late September I also greatly increased my distances while simultaneously trying to increase my average speed. All within the first four weeks of a very stressful move, and starting the new job.

For those of you who are considering greatly increasing both volume and intensity in your training, while going through a big life stressor, allow me to offer a word of advice:

Don’t.

In mid-September, after about a month of this ridiculous load, my body simply said, “I quit.”

It took me too long to figure what was happening. Being in my first year of real endurance training, I’d read about overtraining, but I’d never gone through it, so I didn’t recognize it. It started innocently enough; I was sleeping very poorly. Since I occasionally go through bouts of this, I trained right through it, thinking perhaps the extra effort I was putting in was helping relieve the stress. Mistake number one. Life stress and riding stress have to be added together when considering training load. They are two halves of a whole.

I kept adding intensity and volume. I hit my distance goal for the season about three weeks after the move, riding farther than I’d ridden in two and a half decades. Each long ride included numerous hills far steeper and longer than the ones I was used to in my previous location. Meanwhile, my performance stats kept improving. I figured, as long as I was adapting positively, I should keep increasing my load (provided I took rest days and lighter weeks here and there). Mistake number two. If you’re increasing your training stress in more than one factor (intensity, frequency, or duration), be aware that your body is bearing an enormous stress.

I did five days of lighter riding after my personal distance record. After that, I felt like Superman – like I could ride anywhere at any speed I wanted. So, after the rest week, I did a six-day stretch with two intense time trial workouts and two separate days with hill repeats on that big hill – the final day including a few one minute max efforts within the hill repeats. Crazy.

I simply lost sight of the how often I rode intensely. It was like crack; the more and harder I rode, the faster I got. On the road, I was thinking, “I’m ready to ride with the big dogs. I know I can hold my own.” I felt so excited.

All this, of course, during the first three weeks of a stressful new job, and a new apartment in a brand new area.

I’m sure you can guess what came next.

The Saturday after those hill repeats, during a routine, moderate spin, I realized I felt like utter crap. The entry from my training log says:

Feeling sluggish, irrtiable, uninspired today. Seasonal allergies bad.

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!!!

Yet, onward I pushed. Thinking it was a fluke, the next day I rode a moderate distance, and ended up dragging myself through it. I hated a good portion of that ride. I had started feeling exhausted at work, sometimes to the point where I had to turn out the lights in my office and sleep for 25 minutes just to finish the day. I did finally figured out that I had gone too far, but there, too, I made a mistake. I only backed off a little, instead of getting off the bike altogether for at least a week as I should have. I just didn’t see the big picture.

I dug a huge hole for myself, and, long story short, I ended up having to do little to no riding for the better part of three long weeks. My allergies were raging. I was sickly-thin and couldn’t gain weight.

I started doubling up on helpful nutritional supplements like ginseng and B vitamins, eating mountains of healthy greens, and adding red meat to my diet. I firmly re-established my sleep cycle, and did light cross-training like hiking, yoga and long walks. By the time I started feeling even a little healthy again, I had lost months’ worth of fitness, which I’m currently still regaining -- slowly.

And so it was that I learned the limits of my body. Overtraining is a very real thing. In retrospect, and after a lot of research, it’s easy to see the signposts. The exhaustion during the day, poor sleep at night, and increased allergies all started long before I had problems while riding. I could have started extra rest right then and probably saved many weeks of recovery time later.

And then again, had I taken a serious break once I did find that I couldn’t ride well and that I was hating the act of riding (other common signs of overtraining), I could have still saved time and fitness.

Training is tricky; usually “less is more,” especially for those of us solidly into middle age and with demanding lives. Then again, sometimes “more is more;” some days that extra intensity is just what I need to blast out the blahs. But when a lot of symptoms are cropping up at once, it’s time to get off the bike and rest.

I can’t say that you’ll always come back stronger – sometimes, you might lose a bit of fitness. But at the very least, you’ll lose a lot less than you would if you pushed through it.

So, that’s where I’ve been all these weeks. With luck, I’m solidly back now, and you’ll be hearing from me.

How Do You Keep it Fun?

My recent post about what it means to be a serious rider spurred some interesting comments from reader Dave (scroll down at the original post, linked above, for the comments) about how to keep riding fun. It got me thinking about the tricks I use. I’m going to post a couple, and then I’m going to ask you to use the comments link, at the bottom of this post, to add your ideas to the list. Do you ever hit the doldrums with your riding? What do you do for it? Without further ado, some ways that I keep it fun:

• Remove the cyclocomputer from my bike (sacrilege!) and go for a ride just to go for a ride – for ice cream, to see the top of a local hill, to explore a new neighborhood.

• If I can’t stand the idea of losing track of my miles, I’ll cut down a Post-it note to stick over my cyclocomputer display while I ride. Depending on my mood, I’ll use one of two kinds of Post-its: a) those tiny page-saving rectangles. If I cut off all but the sticky part, it fits right over the speedometer portion of my display, but I can still view other stats – which I restrict to either total time or total miles, basic info that I can’t use to push myself too much; b) Other times, I don’t want to see any info while I ride, but I still want to track my data. At those times, I cut out a larger Post-it to cover my whole display (leaving in the sticky part to hold the note on the display). Costs nearly nothing; works like a charm. A word of warning: Just knowing that my data is being tracked can push me to ride too hard. Sometimes it's just better to leave the computer at home.

• Take a couple days -- or more -- off the bike altogether. When I first started riding last year, this seemed impossible. I had to ride my standard six days a week. These days, I ride more like four or five. (Not everyone is lucky enough to have that much riding time; I just finished grad school and still haven't found a job, so my schedule has been flexible). These days, I try to take one week out of every four or five to chill out. During these breaks, I ride less mileage on fewer days. Or I'll plan a week off around a long weekend away with my wife -- that way, we get a chunk of quality time together. (I'm often far away on the bike during her days off, or in the basement adjusting on my derailleur, etc.) As these breaks approach, I often feel apprehensive, like I will lose something precious without my riding days. But frequently I have my best riding weeks ever after a break like this. The body and mind become so refreshed by a break from my daily obsession.
  

OK. I know this is a relatively new blog and doesn't have a ton of readers. But there are definitely a handful of you who come daily. It would be great fun to hear from you.

I know some people are a little leery of commenting on a public blog, but rest assured: You do not have to be a Blogger member, and you can simply click on the Anonymous button to submit your comments without any identifying info at all. (You might want to also click the button that will send you updates, because then you can keep track of the conversation.)

OK, so – how do you keep it fun?