Hopefully the racing went well for you this weekend, and you didn’t get in any fistfights on the course (as I heard happened down in LA,) or wind up sliding head-first on your backside down the course –
– it’s at 11:10, and totally worth watching. That’s Niels F-ing Albert. One of the very best guys in the world. So, note to self – don’t feel so bad when you screw up out at the races; we all look like idiots some times…
Anyways, on with the workout…
Today, we’re taking it pretty damn easy. Go for a –
1-2 Hour Recovery Spin –
– Get on your bike. Roll out into the street, and just spin around for an hour.
– Really small gear, no hard efforts – heck, no medium effort.
– Spin. You’re looking to move your legs around in circles, almost like there is no chain on the bike.
– The idea is to get your body moving, flush the systems out, and speed your recovery.
– When you do your recovery ride -if you have the time- just get out and spin aimlessly. At a certain point, your legs suddenly feel better.
– As soon as that happens, turn around, go home, eat, stretch, and put your legs up.
Relax.
Remember, this is a good day to get some core work in if you aren’t totally spent. Lots of info up on the topic in previous posts.
Don’t forget to follow up on yesterday’s race by spending some time with your race journal. Write down all the usual stuff, and make some additional notes in regard to the tactics of the race… what went well/what didn’t; Opportunities you took advantage of to put the pressure on your competitors, and onesyou missed and need to be alert for next time.
Whatever comes to mind, really.
The idea is to start thinking analytically about the race, to try and step outside yourself and see things objectively – as if you were sitting in an armchair watching the race on TV.
If you can manage to ride with that kind of objectivity, you will be a more effective racer.
Sweet. Your job is to turn every race into a sprint.
Good sustained power?
OK. Get to the front. Drive the pace. Grind everybody else down.
Good recovery?
Nice. Attack. Make everybody respond to you. You’ll be able to recover, I’m betting the rest won’t be able to…
– What advantages does your competition have over you? How can you race to minimize them…
Just the opposite of the above.
Terrible sprint?
You got it. Make sure it never comes down to a sprint
Bad sustained power?
Get up front and slow things down.
Have trouble with your recovery?
OK. Keep the pace high enough that no one can attack, but low enough that you don’t overcook it and go over your redline.
Getting the picture?
– Will you need to change bikes? Can you gain an advantage while pitting when you don’t – strictly speaking – need to?
Always scope out the pit area. Know where it is, and figure out the best lines in and out if it’s at all tricky.
Over the years, I’ve been in several races where it was faster to go through the pit and change bikes than it was to ride (or run!) the adjacent “normal” part of the course.
Look for opportunities like this. The pit area is just one of them. Look for that hidden line that no one is using, but will enable you to attack around the group when the timing is right. Keep it in your back pocket, and use it when it will give you an advantage.
…and etc., etc.
What you are trying to avoid is perpetual living in reactive mode at the races.
You know what that looks like, right?
You line up for the start, and have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen.
You spend the whole race looking at what everyone else is doing, and everything you do is triggered by someone else’s actions.
You’re passive.
You’re reacting.
Does that sound like you? Take a look around at the race today, and I bet you’ll see that this describes almost everyone on the course.
So, work on it.
Stop playing defense. Make the race happen for you, not to you.
Think about this when you’re racing today, reflect upon it after the race, and hey – maybe work on starting the race with a plan.
I just know that ya’all love the weekends… and who wouldn’t right?
It’s the time for the racin’ of the bikes… that’s why we’ve been putting in all this work, right?
Nice.
So, hey… racing today?
Go out and do that. The workout for you is Race yer D**n Bike!
Racin’ on Sunday?
Yup.
You’re doing –
Can Openers –
– Warm up for 1/2 hour or so.
– Follow with several short attacking efforts, IE 30 seconds at 80% of your max, or pretty damn hard.
Back off and spin for 5 minutes.
– Follow with 10-15 minute effort at AT level, or CP30, or “I could talk to you if I had to, but I don’t want to” level.
Spin for several minutes.
– Follow with 5-6 full gas start efforts on a straight section of paved road, level or slightly uphill. You want to begin these from a dead stop, with one foot unclipped. Do not stop until you get at least 3 perfect starts in a row, and I mean perfect; this is the cross equivalent of practicing free throws. make ‘em count.
… spin out legs, go home and rest. Get ready to race tomorrow.
Have fun!
M
…tune in tomorrow for some words on race strategy, based on what I saw out at the Seattle Races last weekend. Who know, might be helpful… couldn’t hurt, right?
If you did yesterday’s workout – after all of my dire warnings – I’m pretty sure you’re well and truly gassed today.
Even if you didn’t, you probably need to take it a little bit easy today.
So, do that.
Your mission today – should you choose to accept it – is a nice, relaxing…
1-2 Hour Moderate Road Ride –
This isn’t a recovery ride, you’re going to go just a bit harder than that.
Put a little bit of mustard into the pedals, but not so much that you ever feel like you’re going hard.
Moderate means just that. Not hard, not easy… right in the middle. Easy enough that you could hold a conversation with the guy on the bike next to you, but hard enough that you may not really want to.
Have some fun. You’re not going easy enough to smell the flowers, but you should be able to sneak a peak at them as you whiz by…
That’s assuming you’re racing on Sunday.
If you’re racing on Saturday? Can Openers for you today –
I had a few people come up to me at the Marymoor Velodrome practice session and ask some great questions about their re-mounts and barrier running… I wish I could remember the term somebody coined to describe the lag motion over the barriers I described yesterday; drop me a line so I can use it and give you some credit!
I will add some clarification to yesterday’s post in the next day or so, so go back and check it out if you’re interested. Thanks for the questions. Ya’all are makin’ me think out there.
On with today’s workout…
First things first; you probably shouldn’t do this.
It’s really hard.
I’m not kidding.
For almost everybody, a better bet today is the Slow Roast –
As I write this, I’m sitting in the living room watching the election results come in, and in the spirit of the Tea party, I’m going to offer ya’all a chance to “refudiate” my comments earlier this week.
We’re up to Wednesday, which is, of course, Cyclocross Skills Day.
Today, I want you to go out there and prove that your remount skills don’t suck.
On Sunday I said that they did.
Prove I’m wrong.
Go out there and nail ’em.
First, though… a little bit of commentary and explication, OK?
I saw the majority of people screwing up two things on Sunday; their re-mounts, and their barrier-running. Lots of people clipping barriers out there!
These two things are both usually the result of fatigue and it’s main side effect: to wit, when you are fatigued, you can’t get away with the same crap you can when you’re fresh.
Huh?
The first thing that goes away when you get tired is your “ups.”
In basketball, this means your jump shot goes to hell. You start throwing up bricks.
In cyclocross, you start clipping barriers with your feet and your saddle with your leg.
The solution to the problem – in all 3 examples – is to double-down on the fundamentals.
If you start screwing up the basics when you get tired, it’s because you aren’t doing them correctly.
You’re relying on athleticism and explosive energy to get the job done for you.
This is especially clear when you start clipping barriers with your feet.
Why does this happen?
Because you’re jumping over the barriers rather than running through them.
Check out this vid –
…and take note of how very little vertical motion there is when these guys go through the barrier section.
Note how the leg flips out to the side, like a hurdler –
…as they swing it over the barrier?
Technique.
If you do it this way, you don’t need to jump over the barrier.
(yeah- ugly, right? Sorry…)
If you don’t jump over the barrier, when you start to lose your “ups” late in the race, you don’t clip the barrier with your foot.
If you don’t clip the barrier with your foot, you don’t face-plant.
That’s a good thing, right?
…and it all starts with one tiny little detail.
Worth thinking about, right?
So, same deal with your remounts. If you have to jump up onto the saddle you’re doing it wrong, and it’s going to catch up with you when you get tired.
Eventually.
So don’t do it.
Work on getting it right. Lots of babble on the topic in earlier posts.
————————————————————————————–
OK.
One last thing to work on before we get going, and that’s High-Speed remounts.
Basically, work on em.
I’ve been harping on ya’all to practice your dismounts and remounts at a low speed, and now – clearly – it’s time to work on them at high speed.
The idea is to get back on a bike that’s going fast. When you’re going slow, that usually means taking a couple of extra steps to accelerate the bike up to speed before you get back on.
go as long as you need to. This is tonight’s focus…
– Starts.
Do as many as it takes to get 5 perfect starts in a row. Focus not only on the initial acceleration off the line, but the second effort after you get up to speed. This is the effort that usually gets you the gap – or closes the gap – on that first lap.
– Practice race.
Ideally, set yourself up with a course that will include some high speed barriers 🙂
Tonight, focus on your speed. Work on coming into and out of technical sections with as much speed as you can. Think acceleration… jump out of the corners and out of the barriers. Think about that last corner in that last race on Sunday, and how a fast barrier exit combined with a guns-a-blazin’ acceleration out of that last corner could have won you the race…
It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means, right? It’s…
Two by Twenty Tuesday!
– Warm up.
– Go as hard as you can for 20 minutes.
– Recover for 2 minutes.
– Go again for another 20 minutes.
That’s the basic version. Success on this is, however, all in the details.
The idea here is to go as hard as you can for the duration of both intervals without being forced to go easier at the end of the second interval. If you run out of gas before you finish the second interval, you went to hard. If your vision isn’t blurry at the end of the second interval, you went too easy.
If you’re doing this with a powermeter, you want your wattage output to be as close to constant as possible. We’re talking 10 watt variance at the most. Keep it steady.
These take practice to do well, and the better you get, the harder they get. This is another workout that works great on the trainer, and that’s how I do ‘em, which is a good thing… because I always wind up flat on my back on the floor trying not to puke after the 2nd interval.
I’m really not kidding about the seeing spots thing. If you can learn to push through your limits when you do these, you will get better and you will get better fast.
Nothing new here, right? You’ve seen these before, you’re probably pretty sick of the damn things.
Psych…
Today, if you’re really ambitious, you aren’t doing a 2×20.
You’re doing a Three by twenty.
Just like the Two by Twenty, but add one more interval.
Yeah, you’re probably going to need a rest day tomorrow if you pull this off. That’s OK.
This season is going to be over before you know it. How’s it going for you, so far?
If you took the time to write down some goals and aspirations for this season, nows a pretty good time to pull them out and see how you’re doing.
Check some things off, right?
I went out to the races at Steilacoom today (yeah, still no riding for me. Blech…) Puh-ri-tee interesting stuff.
Takeaways from what I saw?
– Yeah, ya’all are right. By-and-large, the barrier skills still blow.
Seriously folks, wtf? Please, please practice this stuff. You make my heart sore and my brain ache…
– Strategy.
I saw a bunch of people who probably would have gotten some better results if they had just a little bit of a plan brewing during the race.
We’re going to talk about this more later in the week, but for now ask yourself this; are you ever making things happen in your races, or are you always just reacting to the moves made by the other riders?
Think about it…
– Gear.
The state of people’s gear is head and shoulders above where it was even a couple of years ago (thank you bike industry!) but I still see/hear some crazy stuff, like the guy running into the pit trying to borrow a wheel to replace the Dugast-shod one he just flatted.
Really?
You have $100 + tubulars on, and you don’t bring pit wheels?
Oy…
On a positive note, I did see some great riding out there. Super nice to see the people who have been working hard on the details being rewarded with positive results.
Really, really inspiring stuff.
On that note, how about a Workout Of The Day, eh?
You probably saw this one coming from a mile away, but here it is anyway. Today we’re doing –
Your basic good-ole Recovery Ride.
Get on your bike. Roll out into the street, and just spin around for an hour.
Really small gear, no hard efforts – heck, no medium effort. Spin. You’re looking to move your legs around in circles, almost like there is no chain on the bike. The idea is to get your body moving, flush the systems out, and speed your recovery.
When you do your recovery ride -if you have the time- just get out and spin aimlessly. At a certain point, your legs suddenly feel better. Sometimes this takes 1/2 an hour, sometimes it takes 2 hours. After a while, when you get used to having the recovery ride as part of your routine, you know it when you feel it.
As soon as that happens, turn around, go home, eat, stretch, and put your legs up.
Don’t forget to do some core work today, if you can’t force yourself to stuff it into your schedule later in the week!
The workout today should be pretty obvious to everyone, eh?
Go Race!
Simple enough, right?
Get out there and have some fun.
Warm up right, kick some @**. Write everything down in your journal when you’re done.
That was simple.
How about tackling something not-so-simple?
I got the following from Tony, @Osteoid on Twitter –
@Crosssports going on vacation for 10 days to HI. No bikes. I can run etc. Dunno if there’s a gym there. Day after I return is race.
Interesting…
My first thought was “Damn… nice problem to have!”
Seriously, though; as a trainer, this is a situation I wind up having to think about quite a bit .
A scary-large percentage of the training clients I have had over the years have had schedules that looked – more or less – like brief periods of intense riding sandwiched in between weeks of hotel gym & skyscraper stairwell craziness.
So, how do you deal with something like this?
Before you even leave town, if you know you’re going to be away from the bike for a week or two?
Try and work it into your training schedule.
Make it a good thing.
If you can, set things up so that you’re doing an overload week just before you leave town… you’re so blown that you need a week off to recover.
Make it a recovery week and a vacation.
Careful, though; don’t get on the plane to paradise so ragged that you catch something in the airborne petri dish, and wind up spending more time surveying porcelain than exotic terrain. There’s a fine line here, so be mindful of it…
If that isn’t going to work, or you’re going for a couple of weeks – like Tony is – things get a little bit tougher.
First of all, don’t be afraid to just enjoy your vacation.
You aren’t getting paid to race, so the only one that’s stressing about the missing training time is you. If you were a pro, you wouldn’t going on vacation this time of year at all. So, hey… be psyched. You get to vacation and race.
So, that’s when you’re vacationing. Going on a work trip?
Yeah, OK.
Sucks.
Been there, believe me.
Just repeat after me… “this is paying the bills. if the bills don’t get paid, i don’t get to race…”
Then, suck it up, keep a PMA, and make the best of it 🙂
So, that covers the mental side of things, right? Just don’t sweat it. Things are gonna be fine.
Here’s how you cover the physical side of it… (I’m assuming you can’t bring a bike with you…)
– Hotel gyms…
– have gotten a hell of a lot better. Check ’em out.
Many of them actually have decent exercise bikes. If you have SPD shoes, bring ’em with you.
– You can do a Classic 2×20 in the AM while the family gets breakfast, or before your first meeting. Heck, if you’re like me you’re probably doing these on the trainer at home, so no big change to do ’em on the hotel’s torture device, right?
If you can sneak in a 2×20 twice a week while you’re on vacation, you’re golden. Seriously.
– No bike in the gym?
Use whatever they’ve got. Versa-Climber, Airdyne, rowing machine… doesn’t matter. Do something. Get in the gym for an hour every other day for the duration of the trip, and get yourself an intense workout. Good Stuff.
Catch up on your core work –
– This might just be a great opportunity to do all those plank and posterior core exercises you’ve been lying to yourself about doing all season.
20 minutes every other morning, on the day you don’t go to the fitness center. Get on it, and you might even gain some core strength on your vacation…
Activate your vacation activities –
– Oddly enough, I went to Hawaii a couple of weeks ago for work. I got some pretty amazing exercise in while doing a couple of super-touristy things…
Yeah, I snorkeled with the Sea Turtles (It was way cool.)
Mask? Check.
Snorkel? Check.
Swim fins? Nope.
Super simple. Forgo the fins, and the (Totally rad…) tourist-special activity becomes a pretty fantastic workout.
Try to think about other ways you can get some training points organically…
– Walk more.
No elevators, no driving 1/2 block to get to the restaurant.
Hey, it’s OK to be the weirdo in the party. Meet everyone at the restaurant or hop out of the car and run the last mile or two back to the hotel.
– Go kayaking, Canoeing, whatever.
Talk the fam-ly into the group kayak adventure, rather than the big bass boat trip. More fun, and – hey!- a workout 🙂
Etc., Etc. Look for good-old fashioned vacation activities that will also work you out. There are tons of ’em. Hike up a volcano, go boogie boarding, whatever. Be creative, just figure out a way to steer everybody towards the more physically taxing adventure. Really, they’ll thank you for it.
SO, OK?
Lot’s of food for thought, right?
Above all, have fun.
Damnit.
Don’t make it a chore to get your workout in, make it part of the vacation.
Ideally, here’s what I like to suggest folks do…
Day 1 –
Nothing special. Relax, recover from travel.
Day 2 – (before or instead of breakfast. Grab a bagel on your way down…)
1/2 – 1 hour in gym. Figure out what apparatus is there, if you can get in a spin on an exercise bike.
Day 3 –
1 hour in gym, 2×20 on exercise bike or equivalent on elliptical/airdyne/whatever.
Day 4 –
Core work in gym, and run stairs (see stairs workouts in previous posts…) Sub in a scenic run on the beach or whatever (I did a few miles on the roads through the lava fields when I was in Kona…) Get in an hour if you can.
Day 5 –
Back to the gym bike/elliptical/whatever.
Day 6 –
Core work today in the AM.
Day 7 –
If you’re in Hawaii, swim your A** off.
Repeat cycle for duration of trip, and supplement with whatever “organic” workouts you can.
In Seattle, we’ve got racing both days this weekend. If you’re doing the double here (or elsewhere…) be careful with the warming up and warming down. Don’t over-do it.
It doesn’t take much to ride yourself right out of the second day’s race before you even toe the line for the start… a couple of hours on the trainer pre-race, some farting around the course post-race, some standing around in damp lycra watching your friends race…
Pretty damn soon you’ve got no legs for the second day.
So, think about how everything you do on the weekend of the double will effect your race.
Warm up just as much as you need to, no more.*
Have your recovery drink/food/clothing ready to go post-race, and a trainer ready to hop on to if you’re going to need it for your post-race spin down.
Get the bike(s) cleaned immediately after the race, and get everything packed and ready to go before you call it a night.
Remember; it sucks when you stay up later than you want the night before a race ’cause you need to fix your bike, or can’t find something you’re gonna’ need for the next day’s race.
It really sucks when you miss the race because you discover the morning-of that you need a new bottom bracket or have a cracked set of handlebars.
‘Nuff said?
‘Nuff said.
If you’re racing both days this weekend, today’s workout is pretty damn obvious, right?
Go Race!
If you’re just racing on Sunday… well, if you’ve been around here for a while it’s probably just as obvious. Today, you’re doing…
Can Openers –
Warm up for 1/2 hour or so.
Follow with several short attacking efforts, IE 30 seconds at 80% of your max, or pretty damn hard.
Back off and spin for 5 minutes.
Follow with 10-15 minute effort at AT level, or CP30, or “I could talk to you if I had to, but I don’t want to” level.
Spin for several minutes.
Follow with 5-6 full gas start efforts on a straight section of paved road, level or slightly uphill. You want to begin these from a dead stop, with one foot unclipped. Do not stop until you get at least 3 perfect starts in a row, and I mean perfect; this is the cross equivalent of practicing free throws. make ‘em count.
… spin out legs, go home and rest. Get ready to race tomorrow.
Have fun!
M
*….if you haven’t read it, it might be worth your time to go back and read the post I wrote on warming up. You can find it at –
You betcha. I do the personal coaching/trainer thing. Clients have included multiple National and even World Champions, and 2/3 of My Cyclocross athletes made the podium at Nationals in 2009, with one taking home the Stars and Stripes. Interested? Drop me a line at: crosssports@gmail.com
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