At a time of year when the leaves are flying, centuries are calling and fondos are in full swing, many cyclists struggle with holding their hard earned summer fitness in the waning daylight of the fall. In the past couple weeks, I've seen (and received) a number of questions about maintaining form and fitness “for just a few more weeks.” I'm going to let you in on a couple of secrets for your end of season woes.
Let Your Fitness Sag
If you've been hitting things extremely hard all season, you may be in position to gain a lot from letting your fitness sag. Take a look at the performance management chart to the left. You'll see a magenta line representing Acute Training Load (ATL or fatigue), a dark blue line depicting Chronic Training Load (CTL or fitness) and yellow for Training Stress Balance (TSB or the amount of fatigue compared to your fitness.) You'll see a peak around the middle of July, followed by a significant, month long decrease in fitness. After this downtime, the athlete began a series of lower intensity workouts designed to build fundamental skills and prepare for another block of more significant training stress.
In this case, the athlete was feeling burned out and tired, so some time off focusing on cross training and other activities helped him regain his interest in cycling. You can see that the shorter, less physically fatiguing workouts help to maintain fitness and set up the building blocks for bigger days that result in significant jumps in fitness (the sharp rises in the CTL/dark blue line around early and mid September.)
With that idea in mind, the other secret that most cyclists don't think about is….
Return to Fundamentals
When we find our fitness beginning to sag (and our motivation is telling us to take a little time away) one of the best things to do is return to our fundamentals. Don't just go out and put in junk miles (unless you're taking something extremely easy like a coffee shop run) unless you want to remain weak and feel tired. Instead, go back to your fundamentals: muscular endurance, neuromuscular speed and pedaling skills and core and back strength and stability.
What the return to fundamentals does for the body is kickstart the physiological systems that have been dormant for a few weeks. This will prime the body for harder rides (which will be key to building future fitness) and it will help to prevent injury during your return to activity. It also structures your training and gives you a defined timeframe and goal for each ride. You'll find more motivation to ride when each session has a specific goal and you can measure your improvement on a ride by ride basis. So think about what skills have been lacking and hit them hard after you take a little break.
Maybe with these two tips in your back pocket, you'll find a little motivation to finish out your season on a strong note.
