Crosssports's Weblog

Howdy folks,

It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s Skills Day here at the blog!

With the real race action starting up this weekend for most folks, today we’re going to laser focus on…

Starts.

Practice.

Practice your starts until you’ve got them wired.

A good start might not win you a cyclocross race, but a bad one can sure as hell lose you the race.

There’s pretty good bang for the buck when it comes to working on your starts.

So, we practice.

How do we practice?

Here are some tips –

– Start with your pedals at 3&9 o’clock, not 12 and six.

It might take some practice if you’re used to starting with your pedals at closer to 6 & 12, but it really is better and faster.

Every gate start event does it this way, and they do it for a reason, eh?

See what I mean?

-Try starting with your butt on the saddle, and your butt off the saddle. See what works best for you.

– Ditto, try starting with hands in the drops vs. hands on the hoods.

Figure out which variation works for you, and then stick with it. Refine your starts, but once you make a decision – “I start butt on saddle, hands on drops” – that’s it. Don’t switch it up. Just work to improve your starts from this position.

After you have tried a couple of variations at a slow pace, get yourself set to go hard.

Begin with a few medium effort starts, just to work on the mechanics, round off your rough edges, and make sure you remember where the heck your pedals are.

When you start to get the feel for things, hit it hard a couple of times, then back off.

– Do 2 sets of six full-gas starts.

– short effort, just go long enough that you are up to full speed, then back down, turn around, go again.

Just like the beginning of a race. One foot on the ground, dead standstill, get-up-and-go.

– Recover for a few minutes, then Finish the night with  interval efforts on relatively easy terrain.

– “Easy” as in a loop on grass with some tight-ish turns on it, or some pretty buffed double-track.

– Go hard, and work on accelerations out of the turns.

– Every time you slow down entering a turn, get on the gas on the way out of it, ass out of the saddle, working hard.

– 6-8 minutes full gas, rest for 2 minutes, then go again for 5.

– Start each effort with, well… with a start. Like you were working on a couple of minutes ago…

Warm down, go home, relax.

Enjoy!

M

Hey! Want to do some skills and drills with a cool group of folks?

Live in the Seattle area?

Come on out to…

It’s tonight!

As always, please check out…

~ by crosssports on September 9, 2015.

Posted in Cyclocross, skills, The Workout Of The Day