Hi again...
Maybe I haven't quite explained what I'm experiencing completely so thanks for sticking with me on this...
When I'm out doing my rides, I do definately suffer, especially going up hills and I do push as hard as I can. In January when I had more than doubled my miles and my legs constantly ached, I could have lived with that except that my legs ached but I didn't get any faster - In fact at one point I actually got slower and posted within a thread on this forum where someone else was experiencing "burning" legs all the time. I'm all for pushing myself but where I've got a bit lost is that nowadays, even when pushing myself, I just can't seem to see any performance gains. My goal is to be able to average 18mph over 35 miles not on the flat (I'm pretty certain that I could do that easily enough now) but with an average of 1,100 feet of ascent (which is pretty representative of the hilly terrain locally).
Is what you may be suggesting that I need to push myself hard and have my legs ache for a longer period of time than say one month before I'll see any additional improvement? I guess what I'm trying to do is maximise my effort (in terms of increasing my speed) rather than just putting in effort that isn't targetted correctly and therefore doesn't result in performance increases.
I suppose what I'm looking for is some sort of magic formula where someone on the forum says "ok you need to do xyz and if you do that, in x amount of weeks you'll hit 18mph average over 35 miles and riding hilly terrain" ;-)
It all seems very technical and that's even before we start talking about the bike!
As I said before, you won't get faster in the short term, you give the impression you are expecting to see your speed increase as you go, this is unlikely to happen given the fact you are building fatigue, so in fact you may end up going a bit slower and struggling a bit toward the end of the build. You will get faster once you recover from that, during the recovery period. Adaptation happens when you rest and recover.
Re. the making your legs ache for more than a month comment, no, that is not what I am saying, I am saying that you must overload yourself then recover, when you overload, you will more than likely ache! It is quite normal to train hard and progressively for maybe 3 weeks, then back it off for one week. The purpose being you build fatigue over 3 weeks, pushing your limit and probably feeling tired and rather fed up by the end of the final few days of the build, then back off the workload a bit so you can recover in the 4th week. So of you plotted the workload over a longer, you would get a sawtooth sort of pattern with an emphasis on the rising edge (say 3 weeks of progress, 1 week rest) and an overall increasing trend. The length of the overload and recovery cycles will vary person to person, this is something each person needs to figure out what is optimal for them, some people can take more overload than others, some take longer to recover, etc.
I would consider 35 miles with only 1100ft ascent as flat!
