Over Training and Indicators

This past week I learned a valuable lesson; pay attention to your morning resting heart rate, it does indeed give you a very clear indication as to where your body is at.

Normally before I get out of bed in the morning I measure my heart rate while lying flat on my back. I then measure my heart rate while standing beside my bed. Typically my lying HR is between 42 and 45. On Thursday and Friday last week it was closer to 50, which should be a good indication that you're either getting sick and/or are over trained. At the time I wasn't too disturbed by the value and went on with my regular day.

I was actually half a day behind on my training on Thursday so I did my Wednesday endurance workout on Thursday morning, rather than Wednesday like I'd planned. I then had my anaerobic endurance ride to do Thursday night. Well, I only got about 20 minutes through the scheduled workout when I realized that I'd be best to stop as my heart rate wasn't getting as high as I would have expected (even though I was working very hard) and I was feeling incredibly fatigued.

From that moment until late Friday evening I felt absolutely spent. No energy, incredible urges for sugar, feeling sleepy while not able to sleep really well, etc. All are sure signs of over training. So I went to bed early on Thursday, took the day off (from riding) on Friday, and went to bed really early on Friday night.

Gladly by Saturday morning I was feeling pretty good and did take part in the SDBC "A" group ride. This was the first time I've ever done the "A" ride. Normally I do the "B" ride, which takes the same route as the A, but is a lot more structured and a little slower. The elite riders (category 1 and 2) in the club regularly ride the "A" ride so it's supposed to be pretty quick. Personally I didn't find it to be overwhelmingly fast and was able to ride near the front of the pack for most of it. So at this point I'm considering myself recovered.

From here on out I need to a better job of listening to my body, especially when you consider that the next 7 weeks of training are going to be really intense.