Digging deep

It has been a pretty tired start to the week this week. Not for any particular lack of sleep or anything, just that I am in that phase of training, the load is pretty heavy and I am feeling it. The positive upshot of all the training is that I am currently the fittest I have been since I stopped racing at the end of 2016, but currently that fitness comes with a price tag of fatigue. Oh well, that is the price you pay for driving improvement.

I guess you could say that because the tiredness is associated with training, it is a sort of good tiredness. I used to refer to it as righteous weariness. I tiredness that you know you have earned, rather than one that you have inflicted upon yourself due to poor sleep habits etc. Something nice about that.

Still, whether weariness is righteous or not, it still needs to be managed, which I am currently trying to do pretty carefully. The main form of management is through getting enough sleep. You can sustain a surprisingly big load of training if you are getting enough sleep. And even if you are getting to the end of a day exhausted, you can wake up feeling surprisingly fresh if you give yourself that chance to recover. Of course other recovery practices are important too, stretching, rolling, eating right etc, but good and sufficient sleep is probably the biggest factor when it comes to recovering well and keeping the fatigue at bay.

Oh course another important part of managing weariness is load management. This can be done through tracking fatigue in software like TrainingPeaks, tracking metrics like HRV or just by listening to your body. Whichever method you choose it is important that you keep an eye on load and build in some unload time to the program when you need it. The week I am currently in is actually a lighter week, following on from a very heavy week of training last week. I am still tired, but the lighter week is aimed at trying to remedy that before one last big push for fitness before race day in October. The real focus at the moment is building as much strength and fitness as possible before race day, but there is also a focus on doing that smart. No point building fitness by digging such a big fatigue hole that you can ever get out of it.

I think I am digging a pretty deep hole at the moment, but I am pretty sure I can still see the light at the top.