Help, I'm tired
This happens every now and again when you do professional sports, your start to become tired. I'm not a robot just yet.
In the spring, when we plan the overall training hours I’ll accomplish during my season, We think of two things. The first one is how to split the training load correctly throughout the year so that I get to the first races in the correct shape, but also I need to be able to last all winter with a peak of my form planned for the Junior World Championships in late February. The second thing we tend to think about is how to not fall into overtraining, get too tired and ultimately fall ill. And in the end, can you guess what’s happened, I’m very tired, feeling quite ill and my performance has fallen. Let’s talk about it.
A look back on the summer
Last summer in 2022 I accomplished approximately 155 hours of training split pretty evenly between July and August. This was exactly the same amount as what I had done the year before that and it was what we wanted, 155 hours was already a decent amount of training and my trainer back then didn’t feel the need for an augmentation. This summer after having calculated all my training hours we are looking at something close to 180 hours, about 90 hours each month. 25 hours more than the previous year, this is a massive leap and a lot more than we had planned (+15h).
Adding the extra 15 hours of training to my summer was a recommendation from my new trainer Rachel, and it’s also quite logical. As I grow older, and stronger and start to aim for new high level competitions I need to slowly up my training hours to be able to achieve this. So why do I have 10 more than planned? Well, that’s linked to a lot of things, one of them was racing the Étape du Tour back in early July, this wasn’t originally part of my summer and I didn’t replan around it once I knew I was racing and the second is that I just love going outside and training and it’s not unusual for me to finish my weeks with more that my training had asked me to do. But is it the cause of my tiredness?
When you read my last newsletter you noticed that I managed to finish up on the podium during some end of summer races in Belgium so you must be thinking to yourself that I wasn’t that tired. Well no I was not. So head down and without thinking of the long term I went straight into the month of September without changing anything to what was originally planned, even though I had overtrained in the summer by a good 10 hours. September also means we up the training intensity quite a bit and stop focusing on long hours but more on short high-tempo sessions.
Where did it go wrong?
Well, that’s a good question, I don’t really know, even now when I look back at what training I did. We went back up to Prémanon for our September training camp during the first week of September and that’s when my first symptoms started turning up. My sleep score on my Polar watch was dropping and my heart rate was higher during my endurance training sessions but also during my HRV test that we do regularly to check on form. I was also struggling to keep up during the tempo sessions we did amongst the group during the training camp.
Worst of all was the fact that later during our training camp was my first summer races, so you can only imagine how they went…. Okay, I’m being a little overdramatic because they didn’t go too badly considering my form. I managed two top 6s in the U22 cat. and a top 15 overall in both races. The main point of concern after the first two French races was my shooting performance. 13/20 was my score during the pursuit on Sunday, that’s a long way from what I’ll need to score during the winter if I want to finish up on the podium. However, my shooting times were all faster than the previous years, so not everything is lost just yet.
After my races and my pore form, I should have probably stopped training to recover properly from my illness. But I didn’t and I went on to train for another week in preparation for the second V02 Max test we had planned. This is where I went wrong, instead of resting and recovering, I went straight back into training and then proceeded to accomplish a very deùmanding training session at the end of the week.
V02 max or V02 not very successful
When we first did the V02 Max back in Juna we had always planned to hold a second test during the autumn to see if we had progress and also to narrow down the preparation before the winter. this is important because we can determine our training zones and also choose to focus more on threshold work or interval sessions before the winter. We do our V02 Max test on a massive rolling matte at our National Training Center in Prémanon, it’s a great test, but I’m not very confident on the matte so I never manage to push myself properly to 100%.
Anyway, the morning of the test I woke up feeling alright so I decided to go ahead with it and perform the V02 Max test. I managed to go up to the same speed as I did back in the summer but my heart rate was a lot lower, and my lactate was not as high either. These were both signs I probably could have gone an extra 1 or 2 km/h extra during the test if I had pushed myself further. After all this, I have a V02 Max of 72 mL/min/Kg. Two points down from the test in the summer. This wasn’t the most disappointing, because my oxygen intake capacity had dropped as well. Both things can directly be linked to the fact I was still ill and probably shouldn’t have taken the test.
What’s next
A lot of rest, and I mean a proper week off from training so I can recover correctly for the next training camp and the second weekend of racing in October. This means going to bed early, no more than 1h of training a day and drinking a lot of water. I’ve also started taking some vitamin pills to try and rebuild my immune system and find some more energy again. This rest week was always planned in the training calendar but we’ve taken some hours off it to make it even more restful.
This is all I have the power to write for you this week, be sure to come back next week for a much more well written edition of the Off the Range newsletter.