Are you Stuck?

I know that nobody talks about getting stuck.. I imagine it is bad for your imagine as a great trainer to talk about sticking points or even worse, reversals... Nobody wants to talk about going backwards, but it happens... For the self coached athlete, these reversals can be devastating... What usually happens is performance suffers, so the athlete blames themselves for not training hard enough, so they return to training with a renewed level of effort to improve... Surely upping the intensity will fix it... The truth is not always...
The first rule of getting out of the hole you are in is, "STOP DIGGING"!! If you have been working at an intense level for a long time, you may need to back off and re-evaluate things. Often times the self coached athlete is unable to see what is really lacking... I remember once when I was racing bikes that I wanted to get better at contesting sprints in criterium races...So, I went to work doing speed work, fast pedaling, sprints, explosive starts, and jumps at speed... I got quicker and more powerful, but I still wasn't there at the end of the races... What was lacking was my overall fitness level needed to be elevated in order to not be so spent at the end of the race so that I could cash in on my power, which wasn't lacking at all... So the answer I though was more speedwork... the real answer was more volume of steady state riding to elevate aerobic fitness levels... Exactly the opposite of what I though..