Originally Posted by hambertloot

yes and from what i read overreaching is a GOOD thing if you follow it with recovery which of course i am doing next week on monday

high mileage must be good though for winter training isnt it? i hear it recommended all the time. speed comes in the spring

Well then, see if you’re stronger after your rest than you were after the last time you rested, say 2 weeks ago. If you’re not, then you didn’t rest enough. Stronger meaning the cog you grab on a known hill, or your average speed over a known course at a known level of effort. Speed training does come in the spring, but that’s generally understood as the top-of-the-pyramid training: more zone 4 volume and zones 5a and 5b (on the Friel scale).

It’s a knife-edge balance between training and rest. The commonest mistake of riders new to self-coaching is to overdo it. If you go way off the knife-edge on the high side, it can take a long time to recover, and after you recover, you could be slower than you were before you started the bout of training that put you over. If you recover in a day or two and are stronger, you did not go over, that’s just normal training response, known as supercompensation.

I sounds to me as though you are theorizing that you are slower because you haven’t been training your high end. That’s unlikely, considering the short time that you have been seriously training. But that’s a normal mental pattern for a training newbie: you are slower, so you think you need to train harder to get faster. When the opposite is usually the case.

It’s also possible that you aren’t eating well. Being low on protein can bring on overtraining symptoms. Protein intake should be 1.2-1.4g/kg bodyweight. My maxim is that if my legs hurt on the bike, I haven’t been getting enough protein. Another cause of poor performance can be lack of muscle glycogen due to prolonged training with inadequate carb intake. That can also hurt, but in a more frustrating way in that you simply can’t make the bike go, whereas with low protein you can usually go, it just hurts bad. I’ve never experienced it, but I suppose that long periods of low protein could reduce muscle mass enough to make a cyclist weaker.

I assume that if you’re trying to do a big mileage block to put down base, you’re limiting your HR to zones 1 and 2. In any case, your physical limits are controlled by your ability to recover from training inputs. Recovery is how you tell how your training is going.

I take my resting HR and standing HR after 2 minutes, every morning, and chart them. I know immediately when I’m starting to go over and need to rest. Research shows that an increase in the standing HR by 10 beats over normal indicates overtraining. Resting HR going up by 6-8 beats also indicates that rest is needed.

From what you’re experiencing, I’m guessing overtraining, rather than overreaching. Overtraining is more of a hormonal thing. Your glands get exhausted and you can no longer produce the necessary hormones to get a normal heart or muscular response to attempted effort. Disturbed sleep and emotional swings often accompany this state.