Crosssports's Weblog

It’s Wednesday, and Wednesday is practice night, which means fun.

Yay!

Today’s workout is Cyclocross Skills Practice, and here’s what you’re going to do…

1 – warm up for 10 minutes.

2 – Stretch out after you’re warm. I’m working on a stretching routine post, but I didn’t get it done in time to post it here. Lacking that, just stretch out the muscles you will be using tonight. Pay special attention to all those movements you make hopping on and off the bike that are different from what you usually do.

3 – Barrier skills for 15 minutes.

– 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. Yeah, I know… what the hell… how do I do this? Better/more complete description of the skills side of things will show up on here soon, but this is just the *workout* of the day… cut me some slack!

4 – turning and handling skills for 15 minutes.

– work on tight, high speed turns as well as super tight low speed turns. Roll some off camber slopes, and learn to turn on them as well. Put two traffic cones about 10 feet apart from each other, and ride a figure eight around them, pedalling the entire time. Make the turns tighter and tighter until you can’t hold the line and you fall down. Learn where the break point is between riding a tight line and falling on your ass, and push that line until you are definitively over it.

5 – practice starting efforts

– full-gas starts from a stand still, with one foot on the ground. Do these until you get 3 perfect starts in a row. Make the efforts long enough that you need to shift up a gear or two, but quit right after you do.

6 – Practice race

– This is best if you can do it with a group of riders that are just a wee bit better than you. Push your limits, and learn what you can do at speed. Go faster than you will race, but shorter. If you are racing for 60 minutes on the weekend, do a single 20 minute effort, or 2 10 minute efforts.

7 – Warm down when you’re done. Spin the legs out until you loosen up, then spin for another couple of minutes. Have a drink of water, then go home.

8 – Have fun. Serious fun. This is my favorite day of the week, and I know plenty of folks who think the weekly practice session in Seattle is more fun than the races. I’m not sure I disagree…

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Well, today’s workout is one you should probably get used to seeing on here – The 2×20.

The 2×20 is one of the primary building blocks of your fitness, and is a great default workout. Short on time? Not sure what to do? Do one of these.

So, what the heck is it?

Pretty simply, the 2×20 looks like this:

– 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.

(…but, yeah, it will hurt.)

(…a lot.)

(…but, you know, the good kind of hurt…)

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Phew.

If you had a week like mine, you feel like this:

So, today is an easy day. Spin for an hour easy. Really easy. Seriously easy. Like, so easy you’re boring yourself. No effort at all.

What you’re looking to do is make your legs go around in circles until you spin all the toxins out. Or something like that. I could go into the science of it all, but you probably don’t care.

Spin for an hour, then go home and get some sleep. Re-lax.

M

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Today’s workout is, well… Racing, damnit.

If you live in an area that has racing already, step it up and race.

If they ain’t racing where you are (yet…) go out and “simulate” a race. You know, pretend…

So, what are you working on today?

This is way too damn early to go full-gas for an hour, so break the race up into manageable sections and drill it in small chunks. Nail the start and the first lap, then back off for the second. Pile it back on for the third lap.  Etc. , etc.

Above all, have fun. This isn’t the World Championships, so try to relax and have fun.

… and, yeah…. go fast…

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Well, surprise – it’s day two of this, and I’m already mixing things up.

Two different workouts today; if you have a race tomorrow, today’s workout is “Can Openers.”

If you aren’t racing tomorrow, today’s workout is ” All About Speed “, building on yesterday’s more power oriented workout.

Here’s what the “Can Openers” workout looks like:

– 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.

Here’s what “All About Speed” looks like:

–   Warm up 30 min, then find a gradual, false-flat style downhill section of road with no or little traffic.

You’re going to do 6 -10  10 second Explosive efforts culminating with a high cadence at fast speeds.  The slight downhill will enable you to create speeds that are outside your normal comfort range.

Go really freaking fast. You should wind up totally spun out at the end of each interval, Cadence in the 100-150 range.

Recover 5 minutes between each interval, just spinning around aimlessly is perfect.

You should feel like this:

When you’ve had enough, your form has gone to hell, or your legs feel like they belong in the above picture, spin home and rest.

Ciao –

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Today’s workout is 20/10/5 get ups. Here’s how they work:

Warm up well, and by that I mean roll around for 10 minutes or so. Then, get ready to rock.

You’re going to ride intervals of 20, 10, and 5 minutes, with 2 minute rests between them. The idea here is to ride each interval as hard as you can, with a consistant level of effort, leaving sufficient energy to finish the final interval in the set, at the same output as the first.

Make sense? basically, you’re doing a 20 minute TT, followed by a 10 minute TT, followed by a 5 minute TT. Here’s the fun part – “get ups.”

What the heck is that?

You stand up for part of the interval, maintaining the consistant TT style output. Don’t surge when you stand up, keep it steady. Here’s how this works:

Start the first interval out of the saddle, and stand for the first 30 seconds. After those 30 seconds are up, sit down. Keep the effort going, and consistant. Stay seated for the next 1:30, then stand for 30 seconds. Repeat to the end of the interval, and follow this format for the successive intervals.

Tips:

– I do these on the trainer, with a stopwatch on the bars and an Ipod blaring in my ears. Start the stopwatch at the beginning of the interval, and the format is really easy to follow; you stand up for :30 at the 2:oo, 4:00, 6:00, etc. mark(s). Get it? It’s easy!

– A power meter will help you to keep the level of intensity constant. You really want the power output to be as steady as possible with these. If you don’t have a PM, do these on the trainer, and choose a gear ratio and a cadence, and stick to that for the duration – instant home made ergometer.

– Have fun!

M

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Well, this started as a joke, kind-of, but I’m going to give it a whirl.

Everyday I’m going to tweet a Cyclocross workout of the day and post a more detailed description of the workout/protocol/ whatever, here. I’m not going to kill myself doing this, but I will try to have workouts up every night by about 9pm left-coast time.

I’m going to operate under a couple of assumptions:

– you, the person following this, are racing on Sundays. Feel free to switch days around to make them fit your own schedule.

– The workouts aren’t going to be more than 2 hours long, and will usually be about an hour. Real people have jobs/lives/families, right?

– I’m in Seattle, and we have a nifty Wednesday night training series here. Wednesday is group skills work. If you don’t have this resource where you live, either move to Seattle or find some friends to ride with one night a week. This *will* make you better, guaranteed.

– nobody is going to do one of these workouts, get hurt, and sue me. All the standard disclaimers apply. Do at your own risk, stop if something hurts or gets hurt, don’t be a dick, and be kind to animals, small children, and triathletes.

More as I think of it, and 1st workout up in about an hour…

MH

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Howdy folks,

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I’m not even going to attempt to describe Mr. Hsieh’s work, suffice to say that “extraordinary” is faint praise. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/arts/design/01sont.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=tehching&st=cse

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…continues to be revealed as the spearhead of an unparalleled attack on the civil liberties and basic human rights of the American citizenry.

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/memostatusolcopinions01152009.pdf

…an interesting analysis here,  

http://volokh.com/posts/1236036389.shtml

offers some insight into the Feinstein/Specter FISA legislation of  ’06, which just didn’t seem to make sense at the time.

Ugly stuff.

What’s Obama going to do with all the land mines left lying around the DOJ and OLC?

Not much, apparently.

While I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the President’s actions so far (honestly – who really expected him to take such a proactive and forward stance on environmental issues?) there hasn’t been much to laud in his relative Inaction in regard to the constitutional  siege warefare of the Bush years. “Inaction” may in fact be entirely too neutral a term, as the current OLC is actually engaged in a concerted defense of some of the more disturbingly Nixonian acts of the Bush years – see

 http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202428328854

I am frankly – and unpleasantly – not surprised to see the Obama administration essentially falling in line with the Bush administration’s understanding of Executive Privilege and it’s concomitant expansion of Presidential powers. This was my main – and nearly sole – reservation when it came time to vote in the Presidential primary.

I am leery of a strong, charismatic Democratic president working to expand even further the limits of executive power. An implicit endorsement of the concept of the Unitary executive and a buttressing of the legal foundation for it under Deomocratic party control of the executive branch isn’t desireable – it’s scary. Add monolithic partisan conrol of the House and Congress, trying economic times, and a strong desire in certain parts for a “Daddy/Mommy” state, and you have a recipe for disaster.

It’s not so much that I think Obama himself is going to abuse the powers we (The People) cede to him, it’s what comes farther down the road.

Would Bush II have been possible without Clinton? Would Nixon without Kennedy?

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