Yeah-Meh.

After overdoing it a bit a couple days ago, I figured I'd pay for it. I did yesterday, and hoped with poor nutrition and inadequate sleep I would bounce back to my normal level of mediocracy.
 
Yeah, and no.
 
I managed to get a couple 30 day PRs on segments I hadn't really tried all that hard on recently. Everything was ticking along fine until I got to the halfway point, when my legs switched from "pretty good" to "flat". It wasn't like I was bonking or otherwise drained, but I just didn't have the same energy as I did initially. I backed off a bit to see if they would recover, but it was soon pretty obvious that "all ahead meh" was about the best I was going to get out of them.
 
I finished out the workout with a conflicted sense of accomplishment. There were some good efforts in there, but it showed I'm in no shape to do a stage race at the moment. I'm just not recovering from hard efforts quickly enough. Good thing I have a couple months to turn that around before the Spring Stage Race. Somehow I doubt I'm going to meet that deadline, but it's always nice to be able to kick the can a little further down the road. I'll worry about it when I get there.
 
Recovery during stage races, even the "less than brutal" stage races we usually have up here, is a problem for me. I may have one or two good stages, but I rapidly fall apart most of the time. My time trials always suffer. My best results are from times when the order of the races and my conditioning build me enough of a buffer that I have some padding when the inevitable crash happens.
 
We'll see how the spring goes. As long as I get to ride my bike a bunch, I'll be happy.
 

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