Where Has It Gone?

womack

webboo said:

Going back to your original post you say that you can ride 16 mph without busting a gut and you arrive home reasonably fresh. I wonder if this is the problem. You are not pushing yourself enough and therefore de training. It’s like you are just going on a recovery ride.
As everyone myself included says you have to work harder when you get older. I rarely finish a long ( over 100k ) solo ride not feeling battered as I tend increase the effort towards the end.
I think you are going to have to rethink things or power up that motor

I think webboo, that is an excellent point and certainly not something I had thought of but it does make complete sense.

I have been doing a lot of "leisure riding" of late. Obviously that is now having an effect and I need to start "giving it some wellie" so to speak!

N0bodyOfTheGoat

If all we ever do is easy rides, it's certainly true that at best all you will be doing is reducing the rate of cycling fitness decline. Deciding what's best to do when you have random or short term blips compared to normal is far more complicated, training at a level that would normal improve your fitness could have negative longer term consequences.

For example, I did my best outdoor 1min power and some other short sub 6min climbs that were among the best power figures I managed in 2020, less than a month after having mild Covid in mid March. However, I then found z4+ efforts would leave me absolutely knackered for 3 or 4 days, instead of ~24 hours. I had to go back to lower intensity rides and gradually introduce z4+ over several weeks. By June, I was managing 20min efforts again close to my pre-Covid levels. My fitness went on rollercoaster since then due to numerous setbacks and recovery, but that's another boring story.

A month on from my second jab, everytime I jump on the bike I still have no idea whether my legs are going to be up for a hard workout/race/TT or not, regardless of what I've done in the recent days previous. For example, https://whatsonzwift.com/workouts/tt-tuneup/week-3-sub-threshold-1 on Sunday felt harder than https://whatsonzwift.com/workouts/tt-tuneup/week-4-3030-anaerobic-4 after work on Monday, which I extended with ~17mins of tempo before cooling down.

womack

Thanks to all who contributed / offered advice on this thread.

Went out today for a "short sharp shock", only 15 miles, but giving it some and managed to get back in the mid 15s.

So I think I should do some more of them, get my head down and stop looking at the scenery until I have got some power back into the legs!

Once again, thanks all.