Downtime

Last week was one of those training weeks where I felt as though I couldn’t get out of my own way. The hills out my front door that I usually looked forward to as a nice warm-up had become tortuous leg burners that told me to go home. So, at least a couple of times I did.
The “down” week is inevitable in the athlete’s fitness cycle. You can only build up so many weeks in a row before your body needs a few days rest. If you plan for it, then it seems completely natural and you’re prepared to just rest up and take it easy. However, if you’re training is unstructured and you don’t keep track of what you’re doing, a “down” week can leave you banging your head against a wall wondering, “why do I suck so bad?”
The past couple of months have been a “freeform base” period for me: I ride whenever I can and as good as I feel. For the last 8 weeks I’ve been on the bike 3 or 4 days a week for 2.5-5 hours with LOTS of climbing and/or tempo. But that also means I’m getting 3 or 4 days of rest every week with my Physical Therapy exercises mixed in, and all that rest has allowed me to prolong the “build” phase of my training for almost two months.
I had big plans last week for some monster rides that kept building on everything I’d been doing, but when I started “riding sh#@-house”, I thought about banging my head against the wall. Fortunately, a look back in my training log saved me the pain and revealed I’d ridden 10% more volume in January and February of ‘07 than ‘06, and the AVG Watts I was generating for given intervals and for each total ride were way up. And looking back in my log a little further, this past November and December I was hardly on my bike at all, whereas in those same months one year earlier I’d put in a surprising amount of pre-season base.
So, looking at all those numbers, it makes sense that last week I needed a little extra rest to let my body catch up. After three days of easy riding a quick call to Coach Farrell put me right back on track... sort of. Mike prescribed an indoor workout with lots of spinning followed by VO2 efforts followed by an hour of hard tempo.... indoor?!? Doesn't he know I'm in sunny SoCal where it's 75 degrees and if I'm on the trainer I have to look at sunshine and mountains out my window? Of course Mike knows that, and he also knows that if I'm fully recovered and ready to go I'll be focused enough to do a trainer workout. So, on the day he prescribed the workout I get the rollers out, fill up the bottles, and get dressed to ride. Then I lay on the couch in my riding kit for about 30 minutes and read a magazine instead. Yep, definitely needed one more day of rest. The next day I hit the trainer workout, put out great numbers and I'm raring to go. Thanks, Coach.

Next update: My teammates Brett and Alex are out here for the San Dimas Stage Race! And the reason I didn’t ride my bike in November and December is the same reason my watts are up this season (the PT saga).