The Cyclocross Workout Of The Day for 10.24.18. “Skills night, ya’all.”

Howdy folks,

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s Skills night…

1 – warm up for 10 minutes.

2 – Stretch out after you’re warm.

Pay special attention to all the muscles used in those movements you make hopping on and off the bike that are different from what you usually do.

3 – Dismount/remount skills for 5 minutes , because you probably stink at this, even if you’re pretty fast. Or, even if you’re actually pretty good you could be better. Or maybe you’re actually great at this, but you want to stay that way. Whichever, just do it. It’s good for you.

– Start at literally a walking pace, and slowly increase speed until you can mount and dismount the bike smoothly and perfectly at full speed. Do not jump on and off the bike, you are looking to smoothly slide yourself on and off.

Need a refresher on the basics? Click here.

4 – Starts.

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

Begin with a few medium effort starts, working on all the things we talked about above.

Remember…

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

– Butt on saddle, not off. Unless you typically start with your butt off the saddle (which I don’t think you should, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

– Hands on hoods.

Do these until you hit five perfect starts at slow speed.

Then…

– Bang! Six full-gas starts.

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

Spin easy for a couple of minutes, then…

– Bang! ~pause~ Bang!

– Six full-gas starts, but each start effort will look like this…

– Full effort start from a dead-stop, foot on ground.

– As soon as you get up to full speed, sit back in saddle, take one deep breath, go again, HARD!

– Ouch.

5 – Recover for a few minutes, then finish the night with a series of short 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.

– 5 minutes full gas, rest for 2 minutes, then go again for another

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

– Go until you start to see a wattage drop on your hard efforts (if you’re using a power meter) or until just before you really start to feel tired (if you aren’t.) Yeah, I know that’s a hard-as-hell metric to quantify. Power meter FTW, amirite?

Warm down, go home, relax.

Enjoy!

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