Ever since my great ride in Utah last week, I’ve been off the bike; I’ve been taking a mid-season break. I call it “mid” season since I started training on October 9, so over four months now. I figure I better do a planned break now than have a forced break due later (due to overtraining)! I’ve been able to get a lot of stuff done on our bikes and house during my time off and I’m ready to get back into it.

Today I did get on the trainer to “prime the pump” for tomorrow’s real workout. I just did half an hour easy spin with a 5-minute push at LT, just to see how it feels…and it felt awful! My legs burned immediately and it felt harder than usual. For some reason, I thought after a weekend of racing followed by a week off, that I’d be so fresh my legs wouldn’t burn. Hmmm?! But then again, I got used to riding the road and the trainer always feels hard after that.

As you can see from my training load chart, my chronic training load (CTL) has dropped a bit, to about 80 TSS/day. It was flirting with 90 for the few weeks before Valley of the Sun. My plan for the spring is to slowly bring it up to 110-120 TSS/day and try to keep it there all season long. With spring weather in the long-term forecast, getting that much volume in should not be a problem.