The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for Friday, 8.14.15. “Yay, no formatting errors today!”

Howdy Folks,

It’s Friday. Thank god.

I hope you didn’t have the insane week that I did. Sometimes, you just should have stayed in bed.

For the whole damn week.

The week past was a seemingly endless compendium of seized bottom brackets, loctited crank bolts, bad traffic, lost rent checks, and my neighbor blowing cigarette smoke through the open window of my apartment at 2 in the morning.

Every. Single. Morning.

It was a cheater bar kinda week, and the lever never seemed long enough.

Those will happen, eh?

So, you know what I’m doing for a workout today?

Absolutely nothing.

I’m taking the day off.

Especially since I’m hoping to have another Epic Weekend the next couple of days, today I’m trying to get my bearings back, re-set, and recover.

You might think about doing so as well.

Today’s workout?

Nothing. Take a day off the bike.

Well, ok… we talked about running yesterday, and if you’re now on the “run a tiny little bit every day for the next week” plan, then yeah; you’re doing that today.

…and, of course, if you did the big stairs workout that was the alternate workout yesterday, then you should probably look to spin your legs out a bit today.

Crap.

Better put something up for that.

Here goes.

The day after a hard running workout – especially if you’re doing stairs – I think it’s a good idea to do wee bit of dedicated leg speed work. Note: leg speed, not bike speed. There’s a difference.

One of the things that seems to happen when you throw running workouts into a cyclist’s routine is that they tend to get heavy legs, and lose a bit of that souplesse that’s been developed over months and years of dedicated bike training.

Can’t have that.

So if you ran hard yesterday, today you do some…

Spin Ups –

– Get on your bike and warm up with a leisurely spin, 10-20 minutes.

– After you’re warm, find a nice, long, flat or slightly downhill section of road with little or no traffic.

– Begin interval by rolling into it at a moderate speed, in a gear that’s smaller than you would typically use to sprint.

– Get out of the saddle and sprint.

– Spin the gear up out of the saddle. When your leg speed gets to the point where it’s hard to maintain, sit down and keep going until you are totally spun-out. We’re talking fast, can’t turn ‘em over any faster…

Think Road-Runner fast…