I'm in the "those who train" group. I can't remember the last time I rode for only the pleasure of it. Yeah, so I'm weird, what's new? That saiid, I find great pleasure in a job well done, no matter what it is. Stoker and I had a wonderful tandem ride yesterday, great fun, and also fitting perfectly into our week's training plan - CTL coming up 3 points this week, perfect. Another Perfect Ride™. HRV off just slightly this morning, just like it should be. So I can have my cake and eat it too, dammit. It's raining today, so it'll have to be an hour of VT1 on the rollers. That's not that much fun in the moment, but it's necessary to make the future fun instead of one long bummer of decline.

We usually take 1 day/week off. We watch our recovery with HR and HRV every morning and modulate the training as necessary. Yes, recovery does get slower as we age. Of course. However it's not hard to work around that. One simply has to pay attention to what's going on.