Crosssports's Weblog

Here’s how tonight is going to go…

– Warm up on the bike.

As long as it takes to get loose, you should have a light sweat on when you…

– Stretch.

Active stretching, focus on all the muscles you use getting on & off the bike but don’t use when you’re riding. Stretch just as long as it takes you to get loose.

– Mount & Remount skills. 10-15 minutes.

I wish I  could say that I don’t need to continue to blather on and on about the necessity to practice this stuff, but I was out at the races this past weekend, and I saw ya’all.

Confidence in your basic skills is good, but overconfidence kills. Small little imperfections in our fundamental skills are something that we can get away with, right up until the point that we don’t.

It doesn’t matter what sport we’re talking about, practicing the fundamentals pays off, and you need to keep doing it as the season wears on, and little bad habits start to creep back in.

This stuff is like drilling your free throws in basketball. Doesn’t matter how good you are, or how big a star you are, or how boring it is, you’ve just got to do it…

…or deal with the consequences.

‘Nuff said?

– Technical skills on the bike. 10-15 minutes

Tight turns and off-cambers. As always, work on your entrances and exits from all the technical sections. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Try to pedal througheverything. Keep the gas on, power going through the rear wheel, and you maintain traction.

Work on it. There’s lots more on the bike handling topic in earlier posts, simply enter “Wednesday” in the search box, and you’ll have a fair bit to wade through.

– Starts. Go as long as it takes to get 5 perfect, full gas starts.

Make it feel like a race start. Get off the mark fast, sit down, shift, go again. Remember, it’s the second effort that gets you the early gap most of the time, not the initial effort off the line. Want to be good at your starts? It’s another free-throw type thing.

– Race simulation. 3 ten minute efforts, 2 minutes recovery between them.

Go really f-ing fast. Try and make these efforts faster and harder than you go in the races. You want to get to the point where your efforts in practice and training are so d**n hard that racing seems like a step down in intensity.

How do you do that? You make your race-pace efforts shorter!!

We’re doing ten minute efforts because if you only go for ten minutes at a time, you can dial up the effort so it’s harder than you can possible maintain for the duration of an actual race.

Seems obvious, right? Why, then, do I see so many people out at Wednesday Night CX Practice just tooling around and around in circles for 45 minutes-an hour week after week, with the obvious consequence of never getting any faster?

It’s a total g-damn mystery, amirite?

– Warm down.

Spin out your legs. Take enough time doing this that you feel them unspool and loosen up. Go home, eat, relax.

Enjoy!

M

~ by crosssports on November 7, 2018.

Posted in Cyclocross