Post-cold leg spinner

After 6 days of feeling too ill to train I was looking forward to getting back on the turbo tonight to give my legs a spin to make sure I'm over the cold and ready to train again. I am usually lucky with colds and don't normally suffer for more than a couple of days, so I was a bit concerned when I had to have a day off work because I didn't feel well enough to go in.

Today's session went quite well. Basically I just pedalled at a comfortable working level while I monitored my heart rate, keeping it below 165. As the 45 minutes passed I seemed to get stronger with power genty rising from around 250W to 290W and HR rising to 165. So, providing I feel OK tomorrow I'll be back into the groove with some intervals again.

It's a real shame to have lost a week of training, but as I'm not trying to peak for a specific race I suppose it doesn't really matter. After all, most other riders are just doing longer versions of what I did today as they build up their winter base fitness. Ah, the traditions of cycling!

While I was ill I ate everything and anything I saw. Loads of chocolate, carbs, fruit, cake. You name it, I shoved it in my gob. So I'm also back on my New Year healthy eating plan and trying to cut out the carbs and cheese and increase the protein.

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.