Tired of Being Tired?

Fridays are pretty slow here but my sense of duty dictates I put something up for the faithful who stop by. OK, well maybe I've messed up my training/rest cycle pretty well. A combination of factors conspired to bring me into the New England spring classics season on the heels of a pretty steady rest-free block of training. Complicating matters, my sore foot completely recovered and I was able to start running regularly (at low volume) back in March. Of course, this kicks my ass fatigue-wise and is anything but helpful when it comes to preparing for hard bike racing, but I need to at least keep up a maintenance dose of running so that some running ability will be there for me in the cycling down periods.

So anyway I had an LT test yesterday, on a treadmill. The LT pace calculated for me was faster than I'd have predicted, but the HR value lower. Fifteen bpm lower than what I've maintained in races up to 90 minutes. I suspect two things were going on here. 1) I'm tired. My HR response to training stimulus is way down. Normally if I ran 6:19 pace my HR would be higher than 149 bpm. 2) Using the race pace/average HR method of determining LT is pretty flawed unless you maintain a constant pace. I achieve astonishingly high average HRs in races (when compared to my observed maximum), but I rarely (never) negative split. In running races my pace typically drops. The average HR can end up higher than where the BLa spike occurs.

Thus two lessons, 1) I'm really tired this week, like I was much of last year. I need to deal with this... 2) I need to work on my pacing strategies. Not so much rethink, as execute better. Thanks for reading.