[There are plenty of places where would-be bike racers can learn about how to get into the sport. Trouble is, most of them are unintelligible, boring, outdated, full of holes and/or just plain wrong. NCVC's David Kirkpatrick is none of those things, so when he offered to write a series for GamJams designed to pave the road for the aspiring pelotonista I happily agreed. So if you're a new racer or just about to become one, this series is for you. Leave feedback, questions, suggestions for other topics or additional resources in the comments and David will respond to them there.]
So you think you want to race?
Part 4: The Training Calendar
by David Kirkpatrick, NCVC
Hopefully you’ve made it through your first several group rides without killing yourself or anyone else. Maybe you even made it to the end of the ride without getting dropped once or twice. Definitely, you should have become a lot more familiar with the dynamic of riding in a pack. The more you keep your eyes and ears open, the more quickly you will pick up stuff that will make you a better, more competitive and certainly safer bike racer. In the next few installments, we’ll focus on the different topics you’ll need to consider as you approach your first race.
In the transition from being a bike rider to would-be bike racer, you’ve focused a little more on your equipment and your bike handling and bike racing culture and a bunch of different things, but one fact can’t be overlooked: in bike racing, the fittest and fastest guys usually win the race. There are a lot of sports out there that let you get away with being a bit rusty. In my experience, cycling is not one of them. You need to be pretty diligent about training.
There are as many different training plans and philosophies as there are people to develop them. The point of this article is not to be a full blown training plan, but to introduce some of the concepts that you’ll need to be familiar with in order to be a better educated consumer of training material.
Almost every training philosophy encompasses the idea that training throughout the year is a dynamic rather than constant thing. The analogy I most often hear is the pyramid – build a big enough base and the peak of the pyramid can be really high. So throughout the year you are going to transition from building that base to seeing how high you can make the peak.
A lot of golfers calibrate their games by figuring out which club they hit for a 150 yard shot and move up or down from there. Cyclists do a similar thing with an effort level called threshold. Threshold is loosely defined as the maximum effort you can hold for an hour. There are a bunch of varying definitions but if you think of it like that, you’ll get what anyone’s talking about. Defining your threshold is pretty easy if you have a power meter (and I am not going to touch the value judgment of whether someone who’s never raced should have a power meter) or a heart rate monitor with a recording function. It needs to be done when you are well rested and well hydrated, with no surplus stress in your life. Find a place to ride that has few to no interruptions in it. If you are like me, this place is called the living room – on a trainer. Warm up for about 20 minutes and get a good sweat going, and be sure to throw in a couple of minutes of uncomfortably hard riding. Then take three or four minutes to just spin fast with no load on the pedals. Next, do a 30 minute time trial, riding as hard as you can for 30 minutes. Your goal is to produce a reasonably constant effort level throughout, but start out maybe a bit softer than you think you can hold, as the test is worthless if you blow up 15 minutes in. It’s okay to gradually increase your effort. If you are using a power meter, take your average power for the 30 minutes. If you are using a heart rate monitor, take the average of the last 20 minutes of the time trial. Multiply that number (either power or heart rate) by .95, and you have a very close approximation of your threshold. If you didn’t absolutely blow up either during or at the very end of this time trial, retest yourself in a few days when you are once again well rested. You can probably go harder than you did.
A popular school of thought says that the more time you spend training right around your threshold, including during the traditional “off season,” the better off you’ll be. There are many for whom going above threshold in the off season is taboo. As a general rule, you are going to spend a few months from around Thanksgiving to around Valentine’s Day doing a lot of work without exceeding threshold very often. This “builds the base” of your pyramid. The primary goals of the off season are to build endurance and to adapt physiologically to riding your bike a lot. This means you’ll be spending a fair amount of time riding, but you won’t be doing all out efforts very often if at all. It’s okay to race your buddy to a town line sign occasionally, but that shouldn’t be the focus of your program just now.
If you’re like me, once you’ve started doing group rides you want to keep doing them. They’re fun. The only problem is that you often go over your threshold during a group ride. Well, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. As long as you are getting a bunch of more moderate efforts in throughout the week, one group ride a week in the off season isn’t going to derail your season. In fact, the development of skills that you’ll get in a group ride at this point definitely outweighs any negatives of going too hard occasionally. The challenge is to keep your enthusiasm and fitness on the upslope without hitting a peak and starting a physical and emotional fade too early.
Right around the time that these few months of base building end, the training race season is in full swing. Training races are a great way to keep working on your pack riding skills, get a flavor for how races go, and start to work in some structured harder efforts. It’s also a good time and place to start working on your sprint. Sprinting ability is key to doing well in lower category bike races, so you want to start working hard on these skills. Really teach your muscles to spin the cranks at high, high rpms. You should be able to get to at least 120 rpm. Don’t worry too much about putting force into the pedals yet, just focus on developing the leg speed. Around this time, you will also want to start doing some intervals of 20 minutes and less, at efforts slightly above your threshold. Intervals suck but they pay big dividends. These longer intervals will nudge you’re the work that you can do at threshold ever higher. Your body also needs to learn how to work very hard and then efficiently recover to do it all over again. That is the rhythm of a bike race.
As the training race season winds down, the ‘real race’ season will be starting up. We’ll discuss the actual mechanics of entering and competing in races later, but for now you should plan to be in “holy cow, I’m in really good shape” shape by early April. It takes about 20 weeks to go from “I ride my bike pretty often” to “holy cow, I’m in really good shape.” If you’ve built your base correctly, you should be able to handle long, hard rides no sweat. The short, very intense efforts should leave you reeling a little bit at this point in the calendar. There are always guys who hit the line in tip top shape in the first few races and have quit the sport by May. I’m not going to say don’t be one of those guys, but, you know, don’t be one of those guys.
After the first four or five weeks of ‘real race’ season (and don’t feel that you have to race every weekend – we in the Mid Atlantic are fortunate to be able to, but don’t feel that you have to), you are going to start doing less miles with much more intensity. You will probably have 2 or 3 killer workouts or races a week coupled with some very easy days. Your total time spent on the bike will drop, as the volume of work you can do at the level you’re working at is smaller. As you go through this phase, you will feel like absolute living hell sometimes and bulletproof at others. It’s kind of an odd sensation.
Most racers will pick a couple of weeks a year to be in absolute top form. Their big target races will take place during these weeks. During these few weeks, you are resting a lot and “burning off” the work you’ve done leading up to now. This is the peak, where you can put up some unbelievable performances. Going through a peak will necessarily decrease your fitness over time. You are basically only harvesting the seeds you planted and grew to this point. You are not planting seeds or tending crops, just picking and enjoying the fruit. After a peak, you will probably want some time off and then it’s back to the drawing board.
There are any number of more detailed training resources out there in the world. One particular favorite is “The Cyclist’s Training Bible” by Joe Friel. If you are using a power meter, “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” by Andrew Coggan and Hunter Allen is awesome. But really, whether you choose to train by the seat of your pants or use a coach or somewhere in between, the concept of the dynamic training year should be incorporated.
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Also in this series:
So you think you want to race? Part 1: Questions demanding honest answers
So you think you want to race? Part 2: Your first group ride
So you think you want to race? Part 3: Han Solo or Attack of the Clones
So you think you want to race? Part 5: Toeing the Line
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David Kirkpatrick captained the NCVC Cat 4 team in 2008 and saw 6 of his teammates upgrade to Cat 3, due in no small part to teamwork, strategy, planning and a lot of the other stuff David writes about here. You can follow some of his less structured rants about cycling at flamencochuckwagon.blogspot.com.
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David,
Good stuff, but one point: if you use a trainer or other stationary device to determine your threshold, make sure you find a very large box fan to ventilate yourself with. I've seen studies (it's been a while, don't ask me for a link) that found around a 20% drop in power with inadequate cooling.
Just like a car engine, you want plenty of airflow when you're going full blast.
Posted by: Crispy | October 21, 2008 at 06:22 PM
Good point. Your mileage definitely may vary on this one - my highest 5, 10 and 30 minute power scores are on a trainer, but I've heard some people use an outside and an inside threshold, inside being lower. My elaborate cooling system consists of a 15" fan.
Posted by: Dave Kirkpatrick | October 22, 2008 at 08:04 AM