After about four months of good consistent training, I recently had a couple of poor racing performances that forced me to assess my current fitness and my training calender for some causes. Among other things, I found something rather curious in my racing times over the last few years.
Standing where I am now, still hanging in there after now almost 5 months of training without more than a day off at a time, I go back SIX months and I wasn't running at all. In five weeks, I ran about a total of seven times. Could my fitness be feeling this layoff now, six months after?
Further evidence: Last summer in May and June I was training 4-5 days a week, mostly whatever I felt like running, nothing over 12 nothing under 7, but not overly consistent either. I ran a 35 second PR for four miles in June and lowered that another 12 seconds the second week of July. Looking back 6 months prior? I was training 75-90 mile weeks (75 being the third, down week), hitting consistent LR's of 16-17 with tempo and fartlek days scheduled into each week. While I did do some good racing during that period, did it pay off bigger dividends down the road?
I have more, but I won't get into them because this is long enough, My question involves anyone else experiencing something similar? Anyone else gone through a period of goo solid training only to race poorly and look back to see a flat period 3, 6, even 9 months back? I know there is support of cases like this and my best bet is to stop having "layoffs," but I found this interesting and wanted to know more...