The Legs that Lied.
This morning I almost talked myself out of it.
I clipped in, started pedaling, and within thirty seconds I knew something was off. Heavy legs. Sluggish turnover. The kind of flat that sends you straight into the mental math — five days of training in a row, a couple of call shifts, a week that had asked plenty — and before long you're constructing a perfectly reasonable case for turning around.
I didn't turn around.
Around twenty minutes in, things quietly changed. The legs loosened up, the watts came, and my heart rate settled where it belonged. By the end it felt genuinely good — not "good enough to survive," but actually good. Turns out the body had been bluffing the whole time.
Endurance training teaches you this slowly, if you stick with it long enough: the first twenty minutes are liars. Fatigue always shows up loudest right at the start, before the body remembers what it's capable of. The legs that feel like concrete at mile one are often the same legs that feel like nothing an hour later. The only way to know is to stay long enough to find out.
It was a good week. That's worth saying out loud, because last week wasn't.
Last week was three sessions, a cold that quietly drained everything out of me, and 4am alarms I kept losing. This week looked different — six training days out of seven, 7.1 hours, 468 TSS. Average heart rate of 111 across all sessions, which at this stage of rebuilding means the aerobic engine is running the way it's supposed to. HRV climbed from 7.2 on Monday to 7.8 by Friday's rest day, then held steady today. Sleep averaged just over eight hours. Weight trending in the right direction.
But the numbers only go so far. Two call shifts were woven through the middle of the week — and anyone who's been on call knows it carries a mental weight that doesn't show up in any training log. Fortunately, yesterday was light; I only had to work briefly. Still, the week required constant negotiating. Early mornings, workouts squeezed into whatever margins the day left open. That's just the reality of being an anesthesiologist who also happens to be trying to rebuild an endurance base — most days don't fully belong to you.
What I keep relearning is that a good week doesn't need perfect conditions.
It just needs enough consistency for the body to start adapting. Six days out of seven. Heavy legs that eventually come around. A rest day that felt genuinely earned. None of it is glamorous or Strava-worthy, but it's the actual work — the kind that compounds quietly in the background while you're busy doing everything else.
Alan Couzens has always talked about aerobic development as something measured in months and years, not training cycles. The slow climb in HRV, the weight trend, the gradual ability to absorb more load without the heart rate spiking — these are the signals that something real is building underneath. You won't feel it on any given day. You see it later, when you look back at the data honestly and realize the trend was there all along.
Last week, the alarm went off and I didn't move.
This week, the legs were heavy — and they came around anyway.
That's the whole story, really. Not dramatic. Probably won't stop anyone mid-scroll. But it's progress, and progress is the point.
Weekly metrics: 6 training days · 7.1 hours · 468 TSS · HRV 7.2→7.8 · Avg sleep 8.1 hrs · Avg HR 111 vs. last week: 3 training days · 4.6 hours · 326 TSS