

Running Empty - nashequilibrium
http://www.outsideonline.com/1986361/running-empty

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jac_no_k
I cycle commute to work about 38km each way, currently about a 90 minute
effort. I ride at for me, "threshold" (above 90% of max heart rate) for 45
minutes of that and remainder at "tempo". No where near "ultra" but I think
I'm near my biological maximum.

I too have hit a period where I was feverish for several weeks. Foolishly kept
cycling and became ill / fatigued to the point where it was a struggle to get
out of bed. The physician I visited didn't find anything conclusive and I was
on variants of ibuprofen to control the fever and for pain relief. When I was
finally feeling better, I cycle commuted once and that knocked me back into
bed for another week.

Likely I was going too hard for the conditions. This occurred when temps
during the commute was hovering around 0dC. Low temps make it a challenge body
temperature and may have stressed my body too much.

Strava provides a metric to guess how fatigued one is from cycling. I noticed
that the point when I fell ill was the same time it was reporting record
fatigue levels. I now keep an eye on it but I'm feeling a touch of that
"fatigue" these days. Likely to due to $dayjob and cycling...

I wish there was a way to measure all my activities to guide when I should be
backing off. I've found my breaking point and crossing the that point means
weeks of recovery.

For what it's worth, I'm faster then I ever was... but something is going to
break.

~~~
msandford
A number of the heartrate monitors have "recovery indicators" that are based
off of how steady your heartrate is I think. In other words a very solid
41.2bpm +-0.05bpm would be indicative of full recovery and 42bpm +-2bpm means
that you're still fatigued.

I don't know if you've looked into that at all but I messed around with it a
little some years ago and saw some correlation between low recovery scores and
feeling like a ride was harder than it should have been. I say this as someone
who was a competitive amateur cyclist in college during a time in grad school
when I could really ride.

I would also caution you against doing nothing but threshold and tempo if
that's all you're doing. Morning and evening base training would be really
useful and would definitely make recovery easier. I read The Cyclist's
Training Bible and found that slowing down when I was supposed to go slow
actually meant I went faster when I was supposed to go fast.

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cpncrunch
OTS is almost certainly the same as chronic fatigue syndrome. The only
difference is that in OTS the stressors are usually mostly physical, where in
CFS they are (usually) mostly mental. In many cases there is also an apparent
flu-like illness at onset, although it isn't clear whether this is an actual
illness or just a symptom of the immune system going haywire.

It seems that at some point after prolonged, chronic stress the brain just
says "that's enough", and further stressors result in a reduced stress
response from the brain, rather than the usual increase in stress response
(cortisol, etc.) Essentially it's a form of burnout.

