Over-reaching? Hopefully not...

I've been re-reading Friel the past couple weeks (actually, at first it was more of an attempt to absorb Friel through osmosis as I had the Training Bible in my bike bag for about 2 weeks before cracking that bad boy open). I'd read the Training Bible in january and didn't see a need to create that structured of a training plan in the base phases. The goal was to slowly increase mileage while listening to my legs. As I moved into the first real build phase of the season three weeks ago, I threw Friel in the bike bag with the intent of reading it immediately - and then planning the rest of the season through thoughtful and realistic "periodization." So much for that.

Instead, I jumped right into two weeks of lights-out, put a hurting on myself intervals with a couple long rides mixed-in. By the time I finally re-read Friel to create some structure, I realized that my new-found muscular endurance may have led me astray and into an early-season "over-reaching" stage - something I do believe in doing, but only before the biggest race of the seaon - and before a nice stretch of planned tapering.

So, instead of coming into this week with lively legs, they are all over the place - and my body is sore for the first time in months - including some nice saddle sores to really round-out the ka-ka poo-poo feeling! But, i don't think I've done myself any damage as I stopped the intervals scheduled for this week and have turned the week into a much-needed R&R week.

Besides listening to my body, another helpful tool for determining a need for an R & R week was the excel spreadsheet I've been keeping as a training log. When I looked at duration I noticed that the move into interval training also included an increase in duration - something I didn't mean to do, but happened inadvertantly as my legs felt really good going into the the Build phase. I've included the spreadsheet to the right if you're curious... it would be helpful to also graph intensity in relation to the duration, but found that I haven't been using the right distinctions for efforts, so that information isn't very accurate.

Here's hoping my legs rebound in a day or two and that I didn't mistakenly "over-reach" and create a peak in late May when I really need to have that peak occur in late June for the Dalton 24. I'm sure all is well and my reading of Friel has made me a little paranoid as I wouldn't even be thinking about this stuff if I hadn't re-read the book... interesting how that works...