I cycle commute to work about 38km each way, currently about a 90 minute effort. I ride at for me, "threshold" (above 90% of max heart rate) for 45 minutes of that and remainder at "tempo". No where near "ultra" but I think I'm near my biological maximum.
I too have hit a period where I was feverish for several weeks. Foolishly kept cycling and became ill / fatigued to the point where it was a struggle to get out of bed. The physician I visited didn't find anything conclusive and I was on variants of ibuprofen to control the fever and for pain relief. When I was finally feeling better, I cycle commuted once and that knocked me back into bed for another week.
Likely I was going too hard for the conditions. This occurred when temps during the commute was hovering around 0dC. Low temps make it a challenge body temperature and may have stressed my body too much.
Strava provides a metric to guess how fatigued one is from cycling. I noticed that the point when I fell ill was the same time it was reporting record fatigue levels. I now keep an eye on it but I'm feeling a touch of that "fatigue" these days. Likely to due to $dayjob and cycling...
I wish there was a way to measure all my activities to guide when I should be backing off. I've found my breaking point and crossing the that point means weeks of recovery.
For what it's worth, I'm faster then I ever was... but something is going to break.
A number of the heartrate monitors have "recovery indicators" that are based off of how steady your heartrate is I think. In other words a very solid 41.2bpm +-0.05bpm would be indicative of full recovery and 42bpm +-2bpm means that you're still fatigued.
I don't know if you've looked into that at all but I messed around with it a little some years ago and saw some correlation between low recovery scores and feeling like a ride was harder than it should have been. I say this as someone who was a competitive amateur cyclist in college during a time in grad school when I could really ride.
I would also caution you against doing nothing but threshold and tempo if that's all you're doing. Morning and evening base training would be really useful and would definitely make recovery easier. I read The Cyclist's Training Bible and found that slowing down when I was supposed to go slow actually meant I went faster when I was supposed to go fast.
This is a very good paper that will help you out (Intervals, Thresholds, and Long Slow Distance: the Role of Intensity and Duration in Endurance Training), http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm#_Toc245522384
OTS is almost certainly the same as chronic fatigue syndrome. The only difference is that in OTS the stressors are usually mostly physical, where in CFS they are (usually) mostly mental. In many cases there is also an apparent flu-like illness at onset, although it isn't clear whether this is an actual illness or just a symptom of the immune system going haywire.
It seems that at some point after prolonged, chronic stress the brain just says "that's enough", and further stressors result in a reduced stress response from the brain, rather than the usual increase in stress response (cortisol, etc.) Essentially it's a form of burnout.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] threadI too have hit a period where I was feverish for several weeks. Foolishly kept cycling and became ill / fatigued to the point where it was a struggle to get out of bed. The physician I visited didn't find anything conclusive and I was on variants of ibuprofen to control the fever and for pain relief. When I was finally feeling better, I cycle commuted once and that knocked me back into bed for another week.
Likely I was going too hard for the conditions. This occurred when temps during the commute was hovering around 0dC. Low temps make it a challenge body temperature and may have stressed my body too much.
Strava provides a metric to guess how fatigued one is from cycling. I noticed that the point when I fell ill was the same time it was reporting record fatigue levels. I now keep an eye on it but I'm feeling a touch of that "fatigue" these days. Likely to due to $dayjob and cycling...
I wish there was a way to measure all my activities to guide when I should be backing off. I've found my breaking point and crossing the that point means weeks of recovery.
For what it's worth, I'm faster then I ever was... but something is going to break.
I don't know if you've looked into that at all but I messed around with it a little some years ago and saw some correlation between low recovery scores and feeling like a ride was harder than it should have been. I say this as someone who was a competitive amateur cyclist in college during a time in grad school when I could really ride.
I would also caution you against doing nothing but threshold and tempo if that's all you're doing. Morning and evening base training would be really useful and would definitely make recovery easier. I read The Cyclist's Training Bible and found that slowing down when I was supposed to go slow actually meant I went faster when I was supposed to go fast.
Here is a good video he gave on polarized training, http://www.canal-insep.fr/fr/training-periodization-deep-roo...
There is also the Phil Maffetone 180-Formula, http://philmaffetone.com/180-formula/
It seems that at some point after prolonged, chronic stress the brain just says "that's enough", and further stressors result in a reduced stress response from the brain, rather than the usual increase in stress response (cortisol, etc.) Essentially it's a form of burnout.