The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Thursday, 10.16.14. “Bizarro”
Howdy folks,
I kinda’ love Thursdays.
In large part this is because my bizarro schedule makes it the most weekend-like day of the week for me…
Art by Ed McGuinness
…but it also sits in a really cool sweet spot position of the week, training-wise.
Racing on Saturday?
– Thursday is typically an easy day, or even a day off.
Racing on Sunday?
– Thursday is the day to get in some targeted training.
Feeling the endurance tank is getting tapped out?
Get in a longer ride if you can.
Hey folks, long doesn’t have to mean some 6-hour Roady death march. If you’re typically only riding an hour a day or so, maybe ride your bike home from work the long way one of these Thursdays, and get a steady 3 hours in.
Losing contact with the pointy end of your races when the short, hard accelerations kick in at crunch time?
Maybe do some short interval work
Getting dropped when things point upwards?
Maybe do some…
Short Hill Repeats…
(Yup, we did these last Thursday as well. Totally intentional, takes a couple of repetitions to really get the hang of ’em. Sven hits that sand pit every damn week, folks…)
You want to do these on a climb that has you right on the edge of being over-geared.
There are a couple of ways to do this…
– big-ringable, but just at the edge of being a small ring climb.
– small ring, but steep or with variable terrain, or both.
Each effort should take 5 second or so, which tells you how long the climb needs to be, eh?
Warm up for approx. 1/2 hour, then roll on up to the base of the climb you have selected.
Begin your intervals with an out of the saddle, full race-pace ATTACK into the climb.
You’re looking to blast up the climb, full gas the whole way.
It’s perfectly OK to sit down 1/2 -3/4 of way through the effort – especially if you need to do so to maintain traction – but don’t let the intensity drop.
Try to maintain your intensity for the duration of interval, got it?
You’re going to recover for 30 seconds between each rep, and then 2-5 minutes between sets.
5 reps. per set.
Minimum of 5 sets.
If you can do more than that, great… but make sure you’re maintaining the level of output you had on your first set.
If you have a power meter, you’re done when the wattage you can maintain throughout the set drops off the edge of the table.
That’ll be pretty obvious when it happens, trust me.
Spin out & warm down after.
Remember, please… if you’re racing on Saturday?
Maybe don’t do these.
Probably better to take it a bit easy today.
Unless you’ve been following along with our 2-days before race experiment, and you’ve found that you go well with a hard day two days out.
No idea at all what I’m talking about when I say that?
Check out the last couple/few Thursday posts.
Have fun!
M
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I’m going to do something I don’t feel super great about, and that’s… well…
I’m going to beg ya’all for a little bit of your hard-earned money.
Here’s the thing; it’s right about the time of year where I need to renew all the behind the scenes stuff that keeps this blog up and running, and that takes some dollars to do.
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Honestly, it’s not like I’m trying to get rich off this here thing… or even make any money from it at all.
It’d just make my life a fair bit easier if I didn’t lose quite as much money doing this as I currently do.
So, hey… if you feel like you’ve gotten anything of value out of this blog, please do me a favor – and yes, it’s a favor, and I will be truly thankful for it – and send a buck or two (or five, or whatever…) my way.
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