I’m a bit older than you are. Typically, I will run training halfs in the “winter” (in North Central Florida you have basically 4 weeks of mild temperatures) in the mid 1:30s.
In the warmer (and humid) months, say from May through September (when we are lucky), I will painfully run the same routes in 1:45 and it feels harder and just not pleasant. So, not a surprise if your times vary that much.
Thankfully, I’ll be moving to NC in just a couple of weeks.
98% effort is too fast for a tempo or even threshold run (I’m assuming that tempo = sub threshold not threshold). That’s near all out effort for the duration and will require a much longer recovery period than going at 88-92-94% effort and the physiological gains are not going to be any less running a bit slower, the recovery cost could be much lower.
To paraphrase Jack Daniels run only as fast as you need to make the physiological adaptations you are looking for
I’m the same. Same age, decided to train a little less. I think my older body didn’t like the heat this year (3 months straight 100+F heat index). Running hits you the hardest when it’s hot.
You’re getting old and you don’t recover properly anymore.
I would change “don’t recover properly” to "harder to recover adequately’
Which old guys don’t account for. They should change their recovery plan.if not, the recovery is not done properly.
What once works, will keep working, until it won’t, at which point you gotta change something.
Many years ago I shifted a lot of my 45+ athletes to 5d/wk of running instead of 6. Didn’t see a performance drop in any of them. That was 1 more opportunity for them to recover
Thanks everyone.
I am going to go with some form of overtraining as the diagnosis.
I suppose it’s doesn’t matter exactly what the precise mechanism is.
It is crazy when the results of:
8 months of hard training = results of 3 month break
I suppose triathlon is an excuse to do fun (but hard) stuff outdoors.
I guess it’s easy to get carried away.
It is definitively not fun to completely eat sh#t, when you thought things were going okay.
I suppose another aspect of the fun is learning to know oneself.
And suffering when you are wrong.