Sickness And Saving Your Races: June/July ‘24
Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the latest edition of the In-Form newsletter!
In this one, we wanted to offer a few tips for when you find yourself in the unenviable position of getting sick in the lead up to a high-priority race or event… Whilst it can be a worrying and frustrating situation to face, we reckon if you avoid a few common mistakes and follow a couple of best practices, you can often turn the circumstances around and still perform at a high level (perhaps even your highest level) in your target events 💪
So, the first major mistake to avoid (which is almost too obvious to mention) is simply rushing back too quickly in a misguided effort to try to minimise lost training time! This can be an easy trap to fall into, and it usually results in an even greater amount of time off due to unnecessarily dragging out your illness. In such a situation, your immune system is already hard at work and therefore the body isn’t usually able to respond positively to additional stress in the same way it normally would, often meaning that your standard workouts are counterproductive to fitness progression. Instead, being patient and waiting until you feel much better before you start any kind of return to training is a smart move, and almost always results in less time off the bike. Give yourself time to get back to feeling yourself and then ease back into training with some shorter rides at a lower intensity, using your rating of perceived exertion (RPE) during workouts and how you feel post-workout to guide the rate at which you return to a normal training routine.
Next, using HR-based metrics like resting HR and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) to give you a bit more data on how you’re recovering is often useful. Whilst these metrics shouldn’t solely be relied upon to assess your recovery, it can give extra supporting evidence to how you subjectively feel and thus what approach to returning to training might be best. If you have the means to do so, tracking HRV before the important phases of your season is really useful, so you have a more reliable baseline to compare against in moments where you might feel illness or fatigue setting in, so try to get ahead of that if you can. Tracking resting HR under normal healthy circumstances is good too, so that you can monitor this during your recovery and compare each day to healthy values.
Thirdly, when you feel like you’re past the worst of the illness and starting to train again, using what we might call “bridge” workouts can be good. These are training sessions which aim to make the transition back to your habitual sessions, especially higher intensity ones, more gradual and easy to absorb. They often look like condensed interval workouts, where variables like the interval durations or the amount of reps and/or sets are reduced, so that there isn’t as high of a stress, but enough intensity to reacquaint yourself physically and psychologically to workouts you would usually have been accustomed to in the build up to a race. It should ensure you can get back to this normal approach to a target event without any further setbacks. Given a best practice for most cycling race tapers is to maintain or even modestly increase the intensity of your rides, this approach can be particularly useful in safely getting you back!
Next, see if you can use the time where you’re not quite ready to train hard yet to work on and optimise other important components of high performance, like technical skills and nutritional strategies. These can be done in shorter and/or lower intensity workouts and shouldn’t add a great deal of stress to your training but could have a huge positive impact on your race-day performance.
Finally, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’ve missed out on some training time due to sickness, it may be wise not to overdo your taper leading into a goal race or competition period. Instead, you could use this different situation to your advantage and complete a 2-3 day harder training block a week or so out from a target race, making this training both challenging from a duration and/or intensity perspective and fairly specific to the demands of your event. If you taper off for too long of a period, combined with the lost training time, you may lose a little too much acute fitness to make a top performance possible, so try to ensure you’re doing enough to maintain and ideally progress your fitness, whilst still honing your “form” by sufficiently reducing fatigue and bringing about a level of freshness.
News:
Speaking of racing, we have discipline-specific plans ready to go for hill climbs, MTB marathon/gravel and MTB XCO, amongst others. If you have some later-season important races to prepare for, these could be of help, either to follow closely or for ideas/inspiration. There are also short taper plans to help you optimise the final few weeks before a target race, which can be reused as many times as you like going forward! Here’s the link you need: https://www.highnorth.co.uk/training-plans
On the High North Running site, we’ve also just launched The Complete Workout Library for Off-Road Runners too, so if you’re also a runner (or know someone who is), the library of over 80 structured workouts could be a great edition to your training resources arsenal! You can check it out here: https://highnorthrunning.co.uk/store/p/workout-library
Thanks as always for your time reading the newsletter and we look forward to sharing some more news and advice in the next edition. Best of luck with your riding and training until then! 👋
Tom & Emma
