DaveLeeNC

We had a run of crappy weather that drove me (the ultimate cold rain wimp) indoors for several days. Then San Diego like weather showed up and I rode relatively hard (and long for me) for four straight days (210 total miles at an Intensity Factor ranging between .86 and .92). Last night the strangest thing happened. My right knee developed a toothache, for lack of a better term. It was obviously the right knee that hurt, it didn't matter what I did or didn't do - it hurt. It was, like a bad toothache, hard to pinpoint exactly where the pain where coming from (other than clearly the right knee). And it just kept going. Finally at 2:30 a.m. I took a mega-dose of Ibuprofen and that knocked it down pronto - and basically it is gone today.

So I was guessing that it was the much higher load than normal over four days that did it. In looking at my data, I see that my total TSS (Training Stress Score) for the four days was 880 where my second highest 4 day total (at least for the 6 months that I have owned a power meter) is in the low 600's. So I am assuming that this was simply my body's way to tell me "enough is enough".

My wife/I are in the middle of a one car experiment right now, and I had stuff to do while my wife had the 'car booked'. So I had to ride about 70 minutes to get to/from my errand targets. But it was the easiest 70 minutes that I have ridden in a long time (and felt pretty good - maybe I should do more of this).

I'm not sure what the point of this is other than, if I am right, overtraining can hit you in surprising ways. And being 66 years old probably doesn't help. I have had minor knee issues with cycling, but thought that I had tweaked those out with minor fit adjustments (mostly saddle position). And this was different as it was pain well after the ride, where my knee issues before were during and immediately after rides.

dave

chasm54

Overuse and overtraining aren't the same things. Overtraining is about doing too much with too little recovery over a long period of time, leading to chronic fatigue, among other thngs. It can take weeks or months to recover from it. If you suddenly increase your training load as you just have, you put yourself at risk of injury but it's unlikely you've "overtrained". Overreached yourself is probably a better term. A couple of days rest will sort that out.

DaveLeeNC

Chasm, interesting way to slice and dice this. I had simply viewed things as over-use vs. overtraining where rest was a guaranteed solution to overtraining and over-use leads to injuries and is more unpredictable.

Regardless this one seemed to not fit into either of my categories exactly. It certainly didn't feel like traditional overtraining (symptoms being tired with no energy, etc). And it wasn't an injury I don't think. BTW, when I have knee problems it is almost always my left knee!

Thanks.

dave

Carbonfiberboy 

Chasm is correct. I use ibroprofen as a quick and dirty diagnostic. If it knocks the pain right down, it's tendonitis, almost certainly. That's an RSI. RSIs are cured mostly by strength training, though occasionally stretching is helpful if the RSI includes an irritated bursa. It helps to locate the pain and look at a bursa map to see if that could be an issue. If it's a bursa, you need to stretch the tendons which cross over that bursa. If it's a tendon, you should try to figure out which one(s) it might be and think of strength training routines which will help them. It's possible to be one's own PT.

RSI includes the word "injury," which it is. It's an insult to some body part.