I’ve been keeping a training diary since Jan and I’ve been looking back over it to try to pin point where I might have over trained.

I’d been looking at my training on a week by week basis, and increasing the time and distance according to this, with a tapering week every 3/4th. However, when I look at it month by month, there’s a huge increase i.e in Jan, I only started filling it out middle of the month, and I had a cold so only logged 21hrs of training. But by March, I nearly did 69hours of training.

I guess I thought I was building up time and distance slowly each week, but looking at the total hours each month, it doesn’t look like that.

Whats the best way to use a diary? On a weekly basis or monthly?

You really need to do both, as you’re doing. Do you feel overtrained? 69 hours in a month is a hell of a lot frankly, particularly if you didn’t do much before. A week’s training on it’s own doesn’t mean a lot, but too much happens in a month to be able to accurately plan a month in advance.

You’re right to try and avoid increasing it too much, but if you did 21 hours in half of January 69 in the whole of March isn’t that much of an increase.

The most important thing is to listen to your body. If you feel overtrained, back off.

what are you training for? 69 in a month sounds loads.

I can’t help but thinking that you could train ‘more efficiently’ ie train for less time but train better?

people i know tend to do some thing along the lines of 12,12,15,6 (rest week) and thats training for 24hr

I think it needs to be even longer term…..

Here’s how I used to do it.
Before the start of each season, once dates are known I’d map out the major events and targets. I’d then plan my training around those.

I’d keep a weekly diary with actual training against planned training.
Each weekly page would have running totals leading to monthly totals leading to season totals. Not just distance, but intensity, feel-good factor, resting heart rate, quality of sleep, quality of diet, and so on all rated out of 10. I’d record each race on my HRM and plot it out for inclusion.

If I had a run of not hitting the target, high resting pulse, poor quality, I’d back off a little.

At some points in the year you’d expect to be a little tired. It depends on where you are in your training and what you’re training four.

SB

What stratobiker says ^^. I use a one of those office year planner things, mark out all the events I want to do and work from there. Training book is a simple week to a view A5 diary from WHSmiths, total mileage/time added up each week and each month, makes it easy to look through. Use different colours for MTB/road etc.

Having said that, I’ve not really kept a diary this year – kind of just want to ride, not worry about training. The only exception is the Three Peaks CX which I’m really looking forward to and I’ve already got an outline of what I’ll be doing to prepare for that.

I’m not convinced it’s the *amount* of training you’ve done that’s the root cause of your problem, I think it’s more the type/intensity of training TBH… Having said that, 69 hours in a month is a lot though.

njee20, i was training for the fred whitton and possibly the dave lloyd mega challenge. had to pull out of the fred, and won’t be doing the other one either. i didn’t/don’t really feel overtrained, but i lost all leg power and then i couldn’t keep up with club riders who i’d previously been able to leave behind on climbs. Worst thing was/is that i couldn’t get my head into riding – and still can’t.

i wasn’t really following a set programme for sportives – just riding when i felt like it/when the weather was good. But some training plans i’ve seen would have meant doing more than i was doing (my training was mixed with weights each week, whereas other training i’ve seen has only been cycling based)

anyway, i’m just curious to see what i should have done/where i went wrong – “proper” training is a bit new to me, just used to ride without thinking about it much. i’m keen to do some late summer sportives and not loose all of the fitness i’ve built up so want to “fix” myself.

crazylegs – what do you mean about wrong type of intensity/training?

You need to log other things other than just the volume of training – eg how you feel, your resting heart rate, your weight, etc – add all this information together and you can get an idea of how your training’s working (and whether you’re overtraining).

Other life demands affect how you recover after training. “losing” all leg power” & low motivation are both signs of overtraining.

I use sporttracks, available free from here.

Just load stuff straight in from my garmin (or the turbo in winter) and it is great. You can enter stuff manually too, of course. I use a plugin called ‘training load’ which needs a bit of tweaking, but takes into account duration and intensity of rides, if you have a HRM. In theory, it lets you plan tapers etc.

PS: suddenly getting dropped and losing motivation sounds like overtraining to me too.