HPChiro Blog: March 2009 | Health and Performance Chiropractic

Rest, Sweet Recovery

Usually Wednesday morning is a good morning for me to do a hard workout. I'm recovered from the weekend, and most Wednesdays in the past few weeks have had reasonably good weather. Today, however, I am sitting at my desk watching this perfectly good training morning go by without swinging a leg over the bike, even though I have bicycles on the brain...last night's bicycle themed dinner:
So, no riding today other than my commute to work. I've been feeling tired for a few days, and looking back at the past several weeks of training it was time for a break. Psychologically, it can be hard to take a rest or recovery day, especially when racing is just winding up and you want to keep training to get faster. Sometimes, however, if you just keep training, performance can actually decline.

Some would say that the Holy Grail of endurance training is knowing when to rest, as it is only through the recovery process that you actually get stronger. Having an objective measure of performance and fatigue - a power meter is the best IMO - along with a good plan is what most people need to avoid life in the trenches of overtraining.

The danger of too much training is that your training workload exceeds your ability to recover, and fatigue accumulates. In the early stages, this will lead to heavy legs and decreased performance. If your workload remains high despite these feelings of fatigue, performance will really drop off and you'll become more susceptible to injury, illness, and burnout.

We have all known athletes that train to the point of exhaustion and end up sick, injured or burned to a crisp. Usually, if you asked that person about their training, they would make it sound epic, and they usually sound like they are "getting away with something" and somehow seem to think that they can train a massive amount and they are immune to recovery needs. This is a mistake. Their race performances usually reflect this.

On the other hand, athletes that take adequate time to rest and recover - as well as engage in proper recovery techniques (nutrition, stretching, etc) - will often have season-long solid performances.

I have seen my own racing fitness and results crumble from too much training and racing. I have also experienced seasons with good fitness that lasts most of the season. The difference between those two is recovery. Sweet, sweet recovery, which I am taking today.

For more information about recovery and getting faster, read this article. If you need help with your training or sports injuries, consider working with HPC. We offer Sports Medicine services, Massage, Yoga, as well as customized wellness programs to help you reach your full potential.

Labels: health performance chiropractic, HPC, racing, training

Plan B

Today was supposed to be Banana Belt #2, but it was canceled due to snow. This is only the second race in my near 15 years racing that a race I'm going to has been canceled due to snow, the other being the Mt. Sunapee RR in probably 2000 or thereabouts. That day was kind of like this one - things looked fine in the city but as you climb up into the hills, the snow is sticking and pretty soon it is clear that there will be no bike race.

To make things even more fun, many OBRA-ites had awoken at around 6am, which was really feeling like 5am with the whole spring-forward daylight savings time change. I was about to head out to Hagg Lake when I saw on the OBRA list that the race was canceled. Bummer. So, there I was, breakfast in the belly, fully caffeinated, and ready to roll...with no race. Quinn and I were going to carpool to the race together, so I gave him a call and we agreed to regroup and come up with a Plan B.

Plan B ended up being a new loop that I had never ridden before, suggested by my friend Terry Keele. It is the Whiskey Hill loop. I had downloaded it previously to my Garmin Edge 705 (thanks Karsten), but had never done the loop. I had never used the turn-by-turn mapping feature on the Garmin, so I tried that today. Since we were trying to jump in to the loop part way through, that didn't go well because the Garmin started giving instructions for the last 10 miles...we were hoping it would pick up closer to the start. So, I gave up on the turn-by-turn feature for now, and just followed the map that I had pre-loaded. That worked well.

We were in West Linn when we made the turn to start the ride. The road started kicking our butts immediately, and the snow started coming down hard. The road was Hidden Springs Road off 43, and it STEEP. I am not sure how steep. Maybe 15%? I know I was pushing as hard as I could and only doing about 45 RPM in a 39X25. But, that was really the only hard climb of the day. There were a few other rollers, but nothing too bad.

The most interesting part of the ride was the Canby-Wilsonville Ferry. We originally thought we were going to have to turn around, or guessing that there was now a bridge there, but it was indeed a ferry. And it was free. And we were the only ones on it besides the ferry driver. The picture above is from the ferry after we'd crossed. Not much else to say about the ride other than it was about 5h total and 80 miles from my house. It was a beautiful loop though and definitely one that I will ride again. So, too bad that we didn't race today but Plan B was in some ways better.

Labels: racing, training