Ramble

So a very long time athlete of mine (10 years now I've worked with Mike) has started back up after an extended break after Ironman St George. After retiring and moving to California he's in the position now to basically train like a professional athlete. I've always liked the idea of a 9 day (or 6 day) week for training but it's difficult since our lives revolve around the 7 day work week and Saturday and Sunday. Mike however is now freed from this so we're going to give the 9 day week a try. It will look like this:
Monday: Hard
Tuesday: Moderate intensity volume
Wednesday: Recovery
Thursday: Hard
Friday: Moderate
Saturday: Easy
Sunday: Hard
Monday: Moderate
Tuesday: Easy
 So it's structured as a 3 day micro-cycle with a hard session, then a moderate intensity/ moderate (maybe long) volume session, and then a recovery day. Repeat.

 I definitely fall in to a body rhythm where I balance on the edge of being able to recover or not. For Leadman I worked off a 7 day schedule because of my wife's work schedule.
 Here's a sample week of Leadman training.

 I love my old school hand written log and I'll never change this. My passion is this sport, why log it on something as impersonal as a key board? I even have a superstition that I can only sharpen my pencil (the same pencil I've used for maybe 8 years now) with the pocket knife that my Grandfather carried in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII... it brings me luck. For real.
  Anyway. The week above is a somewhat typical week (and is written in Lucho code. The up arrow is vertical climbed, HR is heart rate, and red pen indicates either quality or long sessions. Easy to see when flipping pages. The last square is the week total) with variation in the Wednesday session. I tried to run long on that day and then back it up with another long run on Thursday but it didn't always work. This week was also done in the last weeks leading up to the Leadville Marathon (the week before Mt Evans) so the intensity is quite high. I made an error though in the cycling volume and it cost me at both Mt Evans and the Leadville marathon. So it went:
Monday: Threshold Bike
Tuesday: Run Vo2 max hill climb 10 X 1:00 + tempo.
Wednesday: Bike long
Thursday: Long run with 4400 ft vertical at 7:37 pace.
Friday: Recovery bike
Saturday: Run 10 X 1:15 hill intervals on 45" rest.
Sunday: Medium long run with a 3 mile hill climb at threshold then an easy bike.

You can do anything and you don't have to make it as complicated as I like to but the most important thing is to find your own structure or 'basic week'. If you keep a log then look for patterns in training. Not only in terms of recovery but also the intensity of the sessions in the days preceding poor quality days. Maybe you went too hard? Getting good is not about that once a week 'secret' interval session... it's about week in and week out, month in and month out consistent training.