Transit Day
Camp Life and Fatigue Management
Slept through the night, which did wonders for my vibe. When I'm out of my groove, and not sleeping normally… my attitude can suffer.
Started the day with a run, 6km super easy alongside the river. Johno led the speedy group for a tour of the town that included 4x1km Tempo reps. Too peppy for me but a beautiful setting.
Post run, packed up and ate the largest breakfast I could remember. Breakfast was delicious and varied. This boosted my vibe. I'd been on travel food & training nutrition since leaving Boulder.
I'm in the van now heading to Annecy. It's been two hours since I finished eating and I'm hungry again. A good sign. You don't want to lose your appetite when training big.
On the drive, I had a nice chat with Seth about what's changed in my approach. One of the neat things about stepping away for a decade is the changes in sports performance are clear to see (when we return). That's a good topic for a future article.
Camp Environment
Something we learned with training camps…
You never get it right the first time.
Meaning, the first time we visit a place we have to spend energy learning about the place:
Training facilities
Where to shop
Food options
Training routes
No point in fighting it. Accept that's the way it's going to be and be patient with the learning process.
Balanced against this learning process… my camp environment…
Sea level
Quiet room
Less work
Increased enjoyment from adventuring
It's a net gain. For elites and serious amateurs, many prefer to stay in their routine and repeat-the-week. Worth remembering if you’re on a budget or have a limited ability to travel. These camps are not a requirement for success.
Stay Put & Repeat-the-week are powerful strategies we can employ on any budget.
If you’re time and cost flexible then you can move between established training locations, stay a while and repeat a routine. As an elite, I’d think in terms of 9-13 week blocks. This offers plenty of time to acclimatize (heat or altitude), establish a routine and do work.
Regardless of your situation, you want to avoid constant change. Routine is our ally.
Arrived in Annecy and got my swim done. One of my rules of thumb is never go more than two days without a swim/bike/run. Workout frequency is foundational.
I volunteered to lead a “no drop” ride tomorrow from Annecy to La Clusaz. The full camp will reunite this afternoon and our pre-camp will be complete.
Annecy is a beautiful town. Highly recommend a stopover if you get close.
Managing Fatigue
My metrics are hanging in…
The TrainingPeaks model (photo below) does a good job with is capturing the impact of Green Zone volume. This is reflected in the CTL/Fitness score.
A year ago, the Double Ventoux ride would have put me “in the hole.”
What I mean is…
Last year, the ride would have been the equivalent of an entire week of bike load in a single day.
Now that my “chronic load” is larger… those big rides are less stressful to my body. It’s a big ride but my body is able to handle a higher level of chronic output. My physiology doesn’t get disrupted as easily.
In practice, this means…
The fitter we get, the greater the stress required to improve fitness.
Because we need bigger and bigger loading days… we need to be more and more careful with tipping ourselves over the edge. As they approach events like the Olympics, the very best athletes can walk a fine line between peak form and ruin.1
Resilience to stress is a form of fitness that is tough to quantify. It’s impacted by lots of stuff we can’t see or measure (thought patterns, moods, noise exposure, pollution…).
What that means is… the models can guide but we can’t predict what will happen.
If you’re interested in this stuff then I did a video on How I Use Training Peaks.
The print is a little small but the model is forecasting my Fitness-Fatigue score will be in balance (roughly) for the first day of camp (Thursday, July 18th).
If I was aiming to peak for a one-day race then I’d have that score strongly positive. If I’d skipped the pre-camp then that would have been the case.
As I’m aiming for a high-volume block, I made the choice to be balanced, rather than completely fresh.
It been more than 10 years since I did a camp like this so I’m sure to learn new things about my current physiology.
The Nature of Training book has a nice section on the differences between training different levels of athlete. It’s a concept that I didn’t appreciate as an elite. We got the hard loading days correct. Where we failed was ensuring sufficient recovery for positive adaptation. That’s one of the changes I discuss with Seth.