Who is the guru on fitness and fatigue?
is it more important as fitness starts to peak?
or more in the ramp-up, reset level? I get that racing should be at peak fitness with low fatigue,
but what about training?
i'm coming off zeroish fitness, and a fat f*k. So avoiding injury, and training soreness which lasts
longer than a day is a real concern.
As we learned in My Cousin Vinny, it's a bullshit question. Nobody can answer these, which is why training & peaking is art & luck, not science.
Fitness goes up by applying training load.
Greater load means higher fitness.
High training load adds to fatigue.
Too much fatigue means your daily training load will not be as high.
Sort of a self-correcting machine in that regard but you end up with a lot of junk miles.
GIGO.
So avoid that option - people like us are old & fat. Never a good cocktail.
You should raise fitness slowly but consistently.
Your fitness will go up.
Your fatigue will go up.
The goal is to have fitness slowly go up but the fatigue only slightly outpace it.
Freshness is the difference between fitness & fatigue.
Freshness is this magic bullet that the coaches always want to try to quantify.
Fitness follows a 6 week (ish) curve and fatigue more like a week + (ish).
So you feather your daily training near the goal event to have shorter, more intense workouts.
Your fitness will not fall much.
Your fatigue will fall.
Your freshness will rise.
You win the race and all the ladies love your fat, old self.
IMO the above is meant for people 17-35 years of age. In the real world, it's harder to pull that off. You should just do with someone like Roger does. Ride a lot all year round, be fit all the time, and just race for the heck of it.
In all my years of doing this stuff I have never seen the whole freshness thing line up as they think it should. That is why I lead with the My Cousin Vinny quote.
YMMV. Good luck, We're all counting on you.