Recovery

In a regular training program, recovery is as important as putting in the hard work.  After beating yourself up day after day, week after week, your body needs some time to rest and rebuild.  Without proper recovery, you will just get more and more tired.  So, a good training program should have some recovery time built in.  My current training program includes three different types of recovery. 

Daily:
After any kind of really hard interval workout, the muscles need some immediate help to recover and be ready for the next workout.  This typically involves fluids, protein, and carbohydrates, and then some stretching and rest.  After working so hard, the muscles are primed to take in these nutrients to aid recovery and rebuilding.  I usually do about three of these really hard workouts every week.  This type of recovery is often provided with some kind of recovery drink, like a protein smoothie.  However, I usually just stick to plain old chocolate milk.  Cheap, tastes great, and I can grab it right out of the fridge without having to bother mixing up ingredients and busting out the blender.  And it contains the 4:1 carb/protein ration that nutritionists feel is optimum for recovery.  My other workouts during the week are less intense, and don't really involve as much muscle teardown and rebuilding, so recovery nutrition isn't as important.

Weekly:
Throughout the week, my training plan is a mix of work and recovery.  My workouts alternate between hard intervals and easier endurance workouts.  So, after those hard intervals, the following day's endurance workout is almost a little bit of a recovery.  It keeps the heart and lungs working, while giving the muscles a bit of a break.  Then, one day per week is a true recovery day, with no work whatsoever.  In my plan, this is typically on Monday.  So, after a hard week of riding, followed by a hard weekend of racing, I take one day off to relax and get ready to start it all again on Tuesday.

Monthly:
In additional to the weekly recovery days, my training plan also includes recovery weeks.  I will do three hard weeks in a row, each building with a little more stress than the previous week, adding to my overall fitness.  Then, on the fourth week, I have a recovery week.  This often includes the same number of workouts, but they are going to be shorter, and somewhat less intense.  My workouts are measured in Training Stress, which I can talk about in another post.  But a recovery week will generally have about half the Training Stress of a hard training week.  I really hate recovery weeks.  After all that hard work, I find it very difficult to rest for an entire week.  I really feel like I need to keep working as hard as possible to continue to build fitness, but I have to force myself to take it easy and trust the system and the training plan.

I am in the middle of a recovery week right now, and it's annoying.  I hate just doing one easy workout per day, and knowing that tomorrow is yet another relatively easy workout.  Today was an easy one-hour ride at "endurance" pace, generally Zone 2 power.  Tomorrow is 30 minutes (30 minutes!!! That just seems stupid!), again at Zone 2.  Thursday will actually be a hard, intense workout, but then Friday is a complete day off.  Per my training plan, my Training Stress for last week was 493, and this week will only be 304.  That's a significant difference in workload.

I am training for two specific "A" events on my season's calendar, and the plan is built around those events.  So I need to continue my training plan based on those events, and don't worry too much about how it affects any of my other races.  So, sometimes I have a really hard week of training followed by one or two races on the weekend.  Even though I will probably be tired for those races, the experience is good, and maybe I can concentrate on helping teammates before my legs explode.

One benefit to recovery weeks however, is that I might actually be in good shape for that weekend's races, even though they aren't necessarily prime races for me.  That will be the case this weekend.  On Saturday, I'll be participating in the Louisville Criterium, and Sunday will be the Air Force Academy Road Race.  These weren't going to be "A" races for me, but because they fall at the end of a recovery week, I may actually have decent form for both of these events, and maybe I can do ok.  We'll see.  Stay tuned.

I'll talk more about this chart in the future, but this is a graph of my training since I started using the power meter in November.

Performance Management Chart (PMC) 3/31/2015

 The Performance  Management Chart tracks my daily Training Stress Score (TSS).  The blue line is my Chronic Training Load (think of it as "fitness").  The pink line is my Acute Training Load (think of it as "fatigue").  And the gray shaded area is my Training Stress Balance (think of it as "form").  The
 blue line shows my overall fitness level, while the pink line shows how tired I am.  When you combine fitness and fatigue, you get form, which should really show how prepared I am for a race.  You can see my fitness generally increases throughout the season, dropping slightly during recovery periods.  My fatigue jumps up and down quite a bit more, spiking during my hardest weeks, and dropping significantly during recovery.  My form is generally opposite of my fatigue.  As I recovery, my form shoots up.  As I proceed through this recovery week, my "form" on the right side of the chart should rise up until I have decent form for this weekend's races.  I may post a new version of this chart every day through this weekend, to see how the graph changes during recovery.