I’ve been pretty lazy at keeping track of this past week. Things have been going ok. I’ve come to the realization as this season ends of the effects of my SPP on my entire season. I will discuss what I believe is at play and how my season has ended up.
Lets start at
Tues Feb 15th
4x60m submax
1x200m @90%
1x6 squats
3x8 bench
Fri Feb 18th
A couple starts after a warmup
Sat Feb 19th
Race
Heats 7.09s, finals 7.08s
Despite having slightly poor starts, then entire race felt great and my CNS was feeling amazing.
To confirm my sharp CNS I pulled out the jump mat to test my vert. We turned this into an unofficial event, a lot of kids came over and tried it, testing their verts. At one point the meet announcer came over and was announcing the results like it was an event. It was lots of fun. Anyway, my vert tested at 39.2 after a couple warm up ones. No cheating with the contacts either. My previous pb on this system was 37.5. So this did validate how good I was feeling.
I have one race left in the season, and at this point I’m battling for hundredths with technique vs the tenths that should come from proper planning of a season.
So I’m over 10lbs lighter than last year, yet running the same times. I’m going to do a slight review of how this season went and where things could have gone better.
In september and october I was coming in off significantly high speed volumes in august and also started losing excess body weight. The past summer I had a great experience with training. My focus was predominantly on bobsled testing camp, and I came in in the best shape of my life and killed it despite being over 200lbs coming back, I was in great shape. In September I started to train with my old coach, and he structures things in a similar way to me, but has less of a consideration for CNS stress. Its more of a 3 Hi day setup, even with the 1 speed endurance day, the volumes are such that the CNS stress are equal if not greater than a speed day. Intensities in sept and oct were such that the setup did not affect much in terms of CNS stress, and so my high fitness from the summer and the loss of weight made for a great combination in early testing at the end of october. Setting massive personal bests in standing 30m and flying 30m electric times. Things were looking up for a great season. Just as things began to intensify in November, the lack of consideration for CNS stress management took its toll. High volume, high intensity and a higher frequency than I would have preferred quickly turned into overtraining. This was apparent in the crash in testing times as well as strength over November. To get out of this funk, december was an incredibly low volume month, I did a lot of recovering, in an attempt to get fresh again. My openers were bad in Nov, Dec 7.1x’s. Come end of December and the start of January there are signs that my performance is coming back. Things begin to feel fresh again, and I run in the 7.0’s for most of the season.
Now what has this taught me. You overtrain the CNS, its overtrained. There is no great bounce back to higher levels than previous.Just a slow miserable hoble back to homeostasis. The other thing that this has taught me is the importance of the accumulation of volume preceding intensification. In january, when we just jumped back into intensification in order to get back to shape, only hundredths of a second were regained. Whereas, I believe the role of a proper accumulation cycle set the circumstances hormonally for greater responses to intensity. And I think this was an important lesson, because I always underestimated the value of accumulating volumes of submaximal sprinting, things like large volumes of accels, sub max fly’s, EFE’s and 95% SE runs.
