Tuesday 8 January 2013

Have I overdone it?

I went to bed last night feeling a bit 'throaty' and woke up feeling slightly worse. I'm fairly sure that this has something to do with the high training load of the last week or so, so I decided to have a look at the stats to see if I could gain any insight. After all, this experiment is a lot more useful if I can use it to determine what my training limit is (if there is one) so I can avoid it in the future.


Above is a selection from my Golden Cheetah Performance Manager chart. The red bars show individual training events, the higher the bar the greater the Bikescore (a nominal value based on average power and duration for each event). The blue line shows short term stress (the average of the last 7 days Bikescores), the green line shows long term stress (the last 6 weeks average Bkescore) and the black line shown Training Stress Balance (reflecting the balance of short term stress (fatigue) and long term stress (fitness)). Basically, the higher the black line the better your form (fitness-fatigue).

I have highlighted the 2 areas where my Training Stress Balance is at its lowest (and coinciding with a rise in training load). The first period relates to an October training camp, and the second covers the last 2 weeks. The October camp had fewer longer rides. At the end of the October camp I felt tired but well, whereas today I feel run down. So it may be that TSB is a poor indicator of overtraining, or that there were differences between the 2 periods that aren't obvious.

Maybe there's something else going on and I've just had a body shock from having to go to work. Maybe I've picked up a bug at work and it's nothing to do with the training. Hopefully I'll be back to normal again soon and back on the turbo.

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