My apologies in advance if this is on the whiny side. I am having the most difficult time getting out of bed in the mornings lately and when I get home at night feel like “taking a quick nap” rather than getting on the bike.
Although I’m not particularly a morning person, I feel like I’m hitting some extremes I haven’t hit since I partied a lot in college (like putting a LOUD alarm clock in the bathroom so I have to physically get up to turn it off). I don’t think I’m overtraining. I think my heart rate is okay, although I haven’t been checking it like I should, and I don’t have the overall body fatigue that I tend to associate with overtraining. It’s more like being generally lethargic than anything. I’m wondering if it might be an iron deficiency or something else I’m missing nutritionally.
I know most triathletes leap out of bed early to hit the pool, etc. and do hours of training every day, so a lot of you probably can’t relate to this, but I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions of things to try nutritionally or sleep tricks (sometimes a power nap really does help before I get on the bike as long as it’s 1/2 hour or less), whatever helps you feel less tired and gets you out the door.
Could be due to daylight savings time and the time change, I always feel that way after the time change and takes me several weeks to recover. Also, this being spring I am riding alot more and think my body has to recover more.
I tend to be fairly sensitive to cafeene, so I do my best to not consume any after twelve or one PM. This allows me to get a deeper sleep at night thus feeling more energetic the next day. I also try not to eat lower quality carbs after about four PM. IMO, spiking one’s insulin before bedtime prevents getting a good deep sleep. With work, shcool, homework, training etc., I usually do quite well on six hours sleep per night.
Oh, maybe that’s not helpful. Irongeek, I’m also a woman and what you describe could be low iron. Sorry to all the vegetarians, but sometimes when I’m training hard I have to make sure there is plenty of red meat in my diet to keep my iron up.
Also, are you eating enough in general? If I don’t eat enough over a few days I start to feel really depleted and fatigued.
Dehydration can also make you feel fatigued.
The other time I felt the fatigue you describe was in the first trimester of my preganancy…
*The other time I felt the fatigue you describe was in the first trimester of my preganancy… *That’s not funny!!
But the other three all sound reasonable…I am maybe just not watching my diet/hydration enough. I’ve been refused when trying to donate blood due to anemia before, maybe it’s time to get checked.
Thanks for the tips everyone. I think Daylight Saving does contribute as well; plus we had really great weather for a while and the last week or so has been total crap. Not like that should stop me from early morning Masters, but…
Pregnancy was my first thought too, but I didn’t want to mention it (too scary). That said, although I do get up early, I can’t recall any recent “leaping” My stuff’s laid out, I get dressed on auto pilot, and generally come to about 40 minutes in to whatever I’m doing that morning.
May be psychological rather than physical. Altough you may not be overtrained physically, you may be overtrained mentally–i.e., burned out or in a rut. Try a mini-break or a change in your routine. Are there any other stressors in your life you are dealing with now? Try working on some of those.
Generally on the subject: First, You Are Not Alone! We all I think have that little dude in our head that goes, “go back to sleep. missing one training session is not going to hurt. besides, sleep is training, right?” Second, I’d say that the biggest advantage of being a pro is not the gross increase in available training hours but the ability to nap in between 2-a-days and, maybe more importantly, to have time each and every day to make sure they are 100% ready to hit a workout. What I hate even more than not getting out of bed is getting out of bed, shuffling around for 20mins in a daze, turning on the tv which has nothing but infomercials at that hour, and then climbing on my trainer only to be unable to get my HR and energy up. Lost my sleep and blew a workout. Then I’ll shower and go to work only to be full of pent up energy and dying for a run an hour later.
Nutrition and sleep tricks: Cutting off caffeine after noon helped me fall asleep faster. Also, working out at night too close to bed time may also make it hard to get to sleep and thus harder to get up in the am. In the morning I have worked up a pretty effective pavlovs dog type response to the bean grinder in my automatic coffee maker. Ultimately, it may be more effective for you at least perhaps for a short time to reduce number of workouts and increase the relative importance you give each one - give yourself a ton of time to be able to get up and fully wake up before attempting to start the work out.
Good stuff. Maybe I need an automatic coffee grinder more than more tri-gear…hmm…what kind of coffee maker do you have? I ~love~ the sound of those beans being ground…
Get a burr grinder versus one of those spinning bladed ones. Generates less heat when grinding. I use a burr grinder made by Capresso. Linens-n-things carries them in-store and on their website.
Oh yeah. I have the Capresso vacuum flask automatic coffee maker. You set it the night before, it heats the water up to just the right temp and stores it in a thermal carafe (no sitting on a hotplate, very bad!). My morning liquid crank, I mean Peet’s coffee is a huge incentive to get out of bed.
Like I said, falgons of coffee. I gave up sex, drugs and rock & roll, a woman’s got to have some vices left…
