Hi, I'm a 22 year old cat 1 road cyclist that up until
this year has been improving quickly and doing very
well, especially in time trials. This is my only 3rd
year racing bikes and before that I was a rower for
some 6 years. This season has been super frustrating,
as I've been performing worse than last, despite
taking a semester off of school to train full time. I
was progressing well through the fall but the only
pivot point I can seem to recall is that I did a VO2
max test in December and my HR got extremely high, up
to 215 bpm. Normally my max is around 202 bpm.
Since then, I've not been able to ride nearly as well
as I used to and there have been some non-training
related issues that make me think it's not just an
issue of how I've been training. I certainly have
never felt overtrained, like hating it or being really
overly fatigued, it's just kind of like something is
weighing me down. My resting HR has never been below
60bpm since December (vs ~45bpm before that) despite
taking a couple weeks off of training and resting on a
couple occasions to see if I'd recover from whatever
is wrong.
I'm really not sure what could be going on, though I
seem to remember reading that Damiano Cunego had a
problem with Epstein Barr in 2005 and it really slowed
up down. I'd admit I was doing higher risk activities
during the fall 2006, and I've never had mono before,
so maybe this is a possibility. Is there anything
else that could be dragging on this long? It's
definitely different than a plateau, as I've been
considerably slower than last year while training less
and also in school. I have a powermeter and can only
climb at like 80-90% of what I used to and have a
problem of blowing up pretty easily and just having to
ride really easy.
Thanks for any help you can offer,
-Ryan