Ethan says I've recently discovered your podcast and love it listening.
I feel like I'm in a cycling cafe with a group of seasoned pros.
Who've invited me to sit at their table and this is awesome.
That's really cool.
Um, I'm definitely not the season yet, so it must be Jonathan over here.
Um, cool.
He says I'm 54 and I've been riding for fun and friendly competition for years.
Usually picking a half dozen events to train for and doing my best at.
Historically, my training has been fairly on point and I can
normally count on finishing in the top third in any event, way to go.
He says in 2020 with all events being canceled, I went off my schedule and
wrote as often as I could for as many hours as I had time for always solo.
Unfortunately I burned out horribly in may and ex exhausted with heavy
legs and frequently light headed.
I took all of June off.
I haven't had my doctor run a battery of tests on me, but she
found I was in fantastic health, despite not feeling like it.
After my break, I was back at full strength in July
and August, but waned a bit.
And he says again, by October, since then, I've accepted.
I seriously over-trained and keep taking recovery weeks, but seems like he
says, but it seems like a week off has me feeling invincible for a few days.
Then I'm exhausted again.
So my question for you, how does an aging warrior in his fifties bounce
back from over-training without a soul and without a soul and fitness
crushing winter off the bike.
Forgive me for breaking up the cadence there he says.
And how might the same guy returned to training hard next year without
facing over-training again?
I have peers well older than me who are still going strong and a,
not ready to hang my bike up yet.
Uh, so thank you.
So his question is how to bounce back from over-training with the asterisk on that
being as an aging athlete in his fifties, rather than a young 20 something or
something else, when you could do whatever you wanted, seemingly, and then wake up
the next day and be at peak performance.
Uh, so.
Pete, I kind of want to hand it to you on this one first.
Um, what, what do you, what would you want to tell them in this case, how
to bounce back from over-training?
Um, I think one of the things we talked about a lot is if you're, if you're
really trying to fill a time, uh, an, uh, an exact amount of time in your
life with only cycling, you will not be doing what you are supposed to
be doing, and we've seen it happen.
I've seen it happen countless times over the years where.
If you have
four hours to spare every third day, you just fill it every
minute of it with cycling.
And that's your check Mark.
You're like, I filled my spare time with cycling.
And what you'll do is you can really kind of grind yourself down without noticing
it because you're not holding yourself accountable day after day after day.
Um, and generally speaking, all of the workouts you're doing
should be like a nice reminder of how you should be feeling.
Like our workout should make you feel a specific way and you should
be, uh, focusing on how that feels and then the next time and
the next time and the next time.
And you'll be able to tell really quickly if you're on a downward trajectory
or maintaining or getting faster when you're just filling your time with
writing, which is very easy to do.
And.
I, I know many of us would choose to do that.
If we could, um, you can't kind of keep your fingers on the pulse the same way.
And so you kind of have to remove the success of your cycling with filling
the time and more with you're trying to do specific things with your time
in cycling and how to do those things.
And I think that's the first thing we got to break apart.
Um, and once you're there, then you can start unwinding all the other things that
are going on with the, with the training and the over-training and all that.
But if you don't fix the first thing, you'll that the rest of
what you do probably won't matter.
That's how, that's how I'm thinking of this question.
I know Amber, you had some notes
too.
Yeah, I
totally agree.
I, I, I think that.
Yeah, well, first of all, with over-training when you, when you
overdo it, it can take a really, really long time to recover from this.
I, I got severely overtrained myself and it.
Probably, I felt a lot better over the course of months, but it
really wasn't until a year or two later that I actually realized
that I felt back to my normal self.
So it's really, really good.
First of all, that you're noticing this and that you're doing something about it.
So huge, kudos you right off the bat.
Um, the other thing I just want to mention about the, the doctors telling you
like, Oh, you you're perfectly healthy.
Um, Just because your say blood test results fall within reference ranges
doesn't mean the most important thing is how you're feeling.
If you know that you're feeling off something is off and if it's
not showing up in your blood work.
Okay.
But it doesn't mean that you're fine.
If you don't feel fine, you're not fine.
Right.
So, so trust your intuition, trust your body.
Um, and, and I would encourage you to try to work with your doctor a little bit to,
to dig more deeply into the symptoms that you're feeling, even if they're not like
really, even if they're nebulous symptoms and they're really qualitative and it's
really hard to pinpoint what's going on.
Um, I'll give an example.
My family, we have familiar familial thyroid problems.
So I've been hyperthyroid my whole life.
It's just a familial thing.
It's not a big deal.
Um, but it's something that I kind of have to titrate with my doctor and,
and figure out how, uh, my supplement is going to is going to affect me.
And one of my.
One of the best doctors I've ever worked with that.
She said exactly this, if you're not feeling right, just because you're within
the right reference range, doesn't mean that this is optimally working for you.
So let's, let's work on moving you within that range and see if we
can get a better outcome in terms of how your symptoms are feeling.
So trust yourself, you're doing a great thing by taking the time
to actually address this now, um, and be patient with yourself.
And then the other thing I would say is focus on some other, yeah.
Kind of ancillary things around the training, because I know that.
It's hard to say, just stop training because you're, over-trained because
it's, it's an, it's a mental and emotional outlet as much as it is physical.
And that can be really helpful in the healing process too.
So you don't necessarily want to Rob yourself of that, but you
definitely need to dial it back.
Dialing back on the volume is going to be really helpful.
Um, dialing back probably on the intensity as well, but you can also.
Focus on some self care type activities that will help your
training like mobility work.
I think that that's a really good one.
You can focus big time on that.
It feels like you're taking care of yourself.
And then when your body is healed and you're back to your, you're
able to start taking on a higher load of training on the bike.
You're going to be in a really, really good position to be able
to handle that kind of work.
And especially at the older we get.
The more we're going to gain from doing mobility work.
So I think that that's just kind of like a no brainer, um,
thing that you can get into.
That's not going to be detrimental and, uh, it can help focus your mind and
still be a little bit of an outlet.
Nate, you recently even went through about, of this.
Yeah.
Ethan, you are doing too much volume.
Simple as that you're trying to come back and like, what can I do to solve, to
do too much volume again in the future?
Um, you have to do less volume.
It might be for the rest of your life.
It might be for six months.
It might be for a year or two volume and intensity.
I would reduce that.
Um, here, here, I just want to give you some ideas of what to do, and then
I'll tell you about my experience.
One is more rest between hard workouts.
You're saying like every, every, you know, I come a full strength.
And then after a couple days, I, uh, I, you know, I, I feel exhausted again.
Well, I would maybe do, if you do one intense workout, either the next day
have completely off or do a light aerobic ride and then have a complete day off.
So every like third day I have a complete day off.
If that's not enough.
Have it every other day be a complete day off.
And then if that's not enough, reduce the intensity of the rides to be a
robotic in nature until you start feeling better again, uh, based on everything
you heard in this podcast before.
Totally look at those, uh, recovery drinks and carb intake, the amount
you will recover when your carb intake intake improves is insane.
Um, I don't, I don't, if you're trying, if you're also trying
to just calorie restriction in general every time, or I have.
Imploded.
I try to like, I am getting so fast and then I'm like, well, what if,
what if I like, just,
what if I lost two more pounds?
I did it while John was talking like, I'm one 92 right now.
If I was one 88, I would be 4.2 Watts per kilo, as fast as John and I could drop
John, maybe someday if he has a bad day.
And I've never done that on a climb in my life.
And I just thought of my life.
I was like, what happened?
I was like, no, Nate, that is bad.
Don't do that.
Because
on the watch and the volume, you'll be faster in the long.
And so I would, that's just one thing to think about sleep.
Um, how was work, you know, all that, all that sort of stuff, make sure
you're, uh, um, you're feeling it.
So in my experience, when I had this, my little implosion, um, I
would fail workouts, workouts that I knew I should've been able to do.
And I would have this feeling during the day of my heart being light and fast, like
by my resting heart rate was a lot higher.
But also just felt like w light.
I don't know.
It's kind of a weird thing to say, but even while lying in bed for me, I took a
complete week off and then I had four to eight weeks of like 50% reduced volume.
I had more rest between hard workouts and I made the super day super easy.
Like some of these are Leno 45% of FTP.
So basically, like, it doesn't even feel, it feels like walking pretty much.
Um, And then after that I had actually a bigger boost in fitness.
And now I'm trying to, uh, not as much volume as I used to
do, but more than I had before.
And then I'm going to take more often, actually recovery weeks.
I just was talking to John about this.
I might be trying to two on one off, uh, instead of a three on one
off a ratio for myself, because in that third week I'm pretty fried
and I don't need to be extra fried.
Right?
Like I'm, I might be better doing less overall for the whole.
Buy something I'm getting older too.
I'm 38.
So yeah, I would, but in general, you're doing too much Ethan.
Like you're, you're telling us you're doing too much.
I come back and I overtrain, what do I do?
It was pretty obvious right?
From the outside.
As most things do, uh, right outside in looking in where
it's hard to see yourself.
What everybody's chaired here is, has been awesome.
Once again, re doubling down on the carb discussion too, that we
have there that can really help.
Uh, the only thing that I would add to this at the end is to remember
that you are not an athlete.
And you are not at a cyclist because you train today.
That's a big thing that we have to break because when we miss a workout, we tell
ourselves all sorts of negative things.
We have the temptation to, to be like, you're not even a cyclist.
You didn't train today.
Everybody else training that you can race against.
And there's all these negative thoughts that creep in with that.
And you have to block that out.
And you have to break this association that you have with, if I'm not training
really hard, if I'm not training a ton, if I'm not returning completely
exhausted, then I'm not a cyclist.
You need to break that assumption.
In this case, you doing the best thing for your health is actually
also the path toward becoming the best cyclist you can be, which is
actually the case for all of us.
So, and, and in whichever circumstance we're in.
So in this case, Ethan.
Focused like, Oh, I really like what Amber said, focus on mobility work.
Maybe some strength work, focus on, on.
Maybe it's when you're on the bike.
You just work on skills.
I don't know.
Like you work on something different than finds more fun
into the sport of cycling as well.
Mountain biking, cyclocross, gravels, something different.
I don't know, but don't associate time off with you not being an athlete.
Time off is a part of the athletic process.
So as you learn to manage that and include that into your move forward,
moving progress, you're going to be in a much better head space, but then
you'll also be healthier as well.
So, um, hopefully that was helpful for Ethan and everybody else that may be
coming up against something like that.
Uh, fuel with carbs, whether it's during or after or before, uh, make sure you're
kind to yourself with over-training and then if you're a beginner racer, make sure
that you, uh, don't ward out stage races.