Impact of race intensity effort?
I’m a 53yo that’s been doing long distance mountain bike races for quite a while and I’m familiar with the effects of 5+ hours of moderate effort with burst of high intensity.
I did an XC race on Sunday where I started strong but crashed a few minutes in. From that point I chased the leader who is slightly stronger than me. According to my HRM, I spent a solid hour in Zone 4 with a spikes to Zone 5. I’ve never maintained that intensity for that long before.
I felt pretty good after the race with just some muscle soreness. However, that evening I couldn’t get to sleep. The next day I felt hungover and drained. I’ve done 50 mile rides that haven’t felt this bad. Is this normal for that kind of effort?
It’s strange how different the impact is to what I experienced from the longer distances.
Posted Mar 11, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC
This is a pretty familiar phenomenon to a lot of bike racers. You went pretty deep, with a sense of urgency. Your body responds with "I got your urgency right here." You get flooded with adrenaline and even though its half-life in the blood is pretty short, the downstream effects can be long lasting, keeping you in low level fight or flight mode for quite a while. Evolutionary adaptation of "in case threat x comes back for another whack at me" is my guess.
That makes sense but it’s striking how different it feels from the distance race. In a 6 hour race I could easily spend more than an hour cumulatively in zone 4 yet that does not have the impact of a one hour sustained effort.