As promised, we’re going to take it easy today, and give our bodies (and minds…) a chance to recover from the hard efforts of the weekend.
We aren’t going to take the day completely off, though.
Nope.
Today we’re going for a nice, relaxing…
Recovery Spin –
– Get on your bike. Roll out into the street – or into your living room if you’re on the turbo – 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.
– Just get out on the road 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.
Trust me on this one, folks; you will recover better, faster and more fully if you make it a point to spin your legs out on your rest day rather than just doing nothing at all.
If you do the massage thing (and, really, you should if you can afford to…) this would be a good day to get that done as well.
Drink a bunch of water, get some stretching in… Treat yo self!
I had an internet cataclysm today, and after about 5 hours of complete insane-making from the clowns at your friendly neighborhood crony-capitalist monopoly Comcast (who absolutely, positively, do not care) I was finally able to fix it by – get this – banging on stuff with a big stick.
I kid you not.
Well, ok… when the banging actually kinda’ worked, It gave me enough info to know what was wrong, and then I was able to actually fix it. But still.
5 hours, a trip to the “service” center, and god knows how many phone calls later… banging on stuff did the trick?
Oy.
Next time, I beat on stuff first.
So, I bet you’re asking yourself right about now “what the heck does this have to do with The Workout Of The Day?”
Good question.
Two things.
Thing 1: I’m exhausted, and still pissed off, so I’m going to make this short.
It’s sneaking up on us quickly. Up here in Seattle, we’re looking at about a month until there’s some CX racing available… if you want it.
6 weeks or so until the local big series starts up.
Definitely time to kick things up a notch.
But, geeze… there’s still road and mtb racing on tap for many of us! It’s still summer, damnit!
Yup.
That’s the reality these days.
Cross has become a late-summer/fall sport, and while the pros are still flogging it around the course in January, the grass roots folks are mostly home on the couch, blown from all the hard racing in September.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
So, what to do today…
Well, racing is good, and if you’ve got it available, you might as well take advantage of it.
If you’re racing tomorrow, you’re going to need to get some kind of openers into your legs today, so might as well do ’em on the cross bike, and get some reps in on that at the same time.
Today, do some…
Can Openers –
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Here’s the drill:
– 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 sprint efforts on a straight section of paved road, level or slightly uphill.
Do half of these from a near standstill, and for 1/2 of them, get going at a pretty good clip before you start the sprint.
… spin out the legs, go home, and get ready for the race.
What’s that you say? You aren’t racing tomorrow?
Give these a shot today anyways.
It’s important to get your day-before-race openers routine dialed in well before you use ’em in earnest.
When race season rolls around – and it ain’t that far away – you want to have a pretty damn good idea of just how much work you need to do the day before a race in order to prime your pump for a peak performance on race day itself.
The goal with your openers is to do just enough work to prepare your body for the next day’s efforts, while being absolutely certain that you don’t leave any of your performance out on the road the day before.
How do you figure out how much to do?
Practice, trial & error, and note-taking.
Do your openers, keep track of exactly what you do, and then keep track of the results the next day.
Start doing that today.
Trust me, the effort will be worth it.
…and, oh yeah; if you aren’t racing tomorrow?
Never fear.
We’ve got you covered, and the CXWOTD tomorrow will make you glad you got yer legs open today. Trust me.
Have fun,
M
Hey! Check out the..…site! I’m proud to be a member of their coaching network. Looking for a coach? We can help you with that…
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about running.
Note, please, the little bit part.
Am I going to tell you to go run today?
Yes.
A little bit.
Unless you’ve been running a s**t ton already for some reason, whatever you do, don’t head out the door today and lay down a blazing fast 5k.
That would be a really bad idea.
Not that I know this from experienc…
Oh, hell… who am I kidding? I’m totally speaking from experience.
I can’t tell you how many times – over soo many years – I started out my cyclocross training with a way too fast, way too long run that completely toasted my legs and made me super damn sore, and accomplished precious little else.
Sore legs alone aren’t a sign that you’re training well, ok?
Doing a workout that hurts you and makes it impossible to train effectively for a few days just isn’t very useful.
So don’t do that to yourself, OK?
I’ve seen many, many riders over many, many years put themselves on the couch for a whole week – even weeks – by blowing up various body parts in a misguided attempt to channel a year’s worth of not-running anxiety into one single workout.
Don’t be that guy/gal.
Onward!
Some words about running for cross, generally:
With certain regional exceptions, the way folks are designing cross races these days, you might not need to train your running at all to be really, really damn fast, even at the top level of the sport.
It’s just not that important anymore.
If you’re in really good bike form, you can fake your way through the miniscule amount of off-the-bike awkwardness that is required on most of today’s courses.
In fact, for most folks, I don’t recommend doing any run-specific training during the season.
None. Zip. Nada.
99% of what goes on in a Cyclocross race has nothing to do with running at all, so why would you waste precious training time on that 1%?
You shouldn’t, with one important caveat: if you run so damn poorly that you throw your entire darn race away the second your feet hit the ground, you need to work on that.
Let’s expand on that a bit.
If you roll into the cross season without having done any running at all, there’s a pretty good chance that the first time you need to hoof it in a race, things aren’t going to go so well.
So, before you need to run in a race, you should probably have run at least a little bit in practice.
What this means is that while I’m not all that big on run training in-season, I’m definitely afan of running in the pre-season.
You don’t need to become an awesome runner, but if you can get just enough running miles in your legs that you don’t suffer a giant shock to the system when you launch off the bike in those early races, you may have purchased yourself a nice little advantage.
I’m always down with things that give us a nice little advantage.
So, we’re going to do some running the next couple/few weeks.
A little bit of running.
How little?
Well, for right now, you need to stop running before your legs get sore.
If you haven’t done any running since last Cross season, that’s going to be an absurdly short amount of time.
Seriously absurd.
We’re talking 10, maybe even five minutes.
Yup.
A five minute run. A ten minute run. You stop before you hurt yourself, and if you start to feel sore knees/legs/whatever, you’re starting to hurt yourself.
When that happens, you stop running, and you walk home. Ideally you stop before that happens.
That’s it.
Put your running shoes on, walk out the door, and go for a run, stopping before you get sore.
Don’t run hard, don’t run fast, just run.
And stop when it’s smart to do so.
Which is probably going to be way before you think it should be.
Keep it under control. Keep it ridiculously short. We’re going to build up the running time slowly, and while we’ll do some running that feels more like an actual workout soon, for now the sole idea is to get something that’s a little bit like running into your legs without messing yourself up.
Goals for today, in order of importance:
#1: Don’t hurt yourself.
#2: Get a little bit of running-like activity into your legs.
Make sense?
Have fun!
M
Some notes:
– if you don’t have good running shoes, and if you’re going to train your running, go get some. Buy them at a specialty running store that will spend time with you to make sure you get the right ones for your feet and for your (probably terrible) running mechanics. Don’t listen to your CultFit friends who tell you to get some kind of barefoot footglove monstrosity to run in. Unless they work for you. Then, whatever. Enjoy.
– Try to run on grass or on trails, if you can, and while you can. Cross races generally don’t have you running on pavement, and there isn’t much reason to train on a surface that’s just going to increase the pounding on your body if you don’t need to.
– 99.9% of you are going to ignore almost everything you just read, except for the “Go Run” part. Have some Ibuprofen and a hot bath waiting for your return from your ill-advised marathon.
We just hit the arbitrary number of “when are you starting up the workouts” enquiries I had set as a threshold to get things rolling, and a deals a deal, especially one you make with yourself.
…or so I tell myself.
Wait…
…am I starting to give people the impression that I talk to myself a lot?
Why am I typing out this internal monologue?
Does anybody really care about this stuff?
Of course not. Folks just want to ride their damn bikes!
Yeah.
Ride the damn bike.
Let’s go with that.
Today’s Cyclocross Workout Of The Day?
Ride yer damn cross bike.
Pull that thing out of the closet…
…and take it for a spin.
No big goals or plans today, just get a few miles in on your cross bike.
Maybe throw in a couple/few dismounts and mounts just to see how much you’ve lost, skills-wise, while you’ve been away.
Seems like people start talking and thinking and writing and plotting and planning about cyclocross earlier every year, and based on what I’ve been seeing out there on the interwebs, this year “earlier” means, well… now.
That’s not such a bad thing.
If you’re in the “Cross is what I really care about” camp, and the other disciplines – road, track, mtb – are something that you do largely to stay in shape and fill the time until the fall finally rolls around, you probably should be training pretty hard right about, well… now.
High Level Aerobic Base
One of the single best things about racing cyclocross is that cross riders get to lay down their fitness foundation in the best time of the year to be out on the bike, the summer. While all the hard-core roadies are out slaving away on training rides in the depths of winter, us cross folk get to go long now, the time of year when even non-cyclists can see the logic in throwing their leg over a bicycle.
Yay, us!
So, take advantage of the weather. Get out there and ride your ass off this month.
What should you be doing?
In short, think long.
Ride a lot.
I mean, it’s nice out, right? It’s fun to ride for 4, 5, even 6 hours when it’s not too hot and not raining.
Long doesn’t mean slow.
Traditionally, this is time of the season when the big-time Euro-cross racers are out on the road clogging up the gruppetto in week long stage races. They aren’t in these races to win them, they’re in them to get pushed to greater levels of fitness by stringing long days of hard effort together, in a way that’s always been tough to do riding just by yourself.
“Tough” doesn’t mean impossible.
I mean, sure… you aren’t going to go out and get a Tour de Luxembourg level of training out of your hard weekend of riding, but if you follow the principles that underlie the intent of these week-long training races, you can probably do better than you’re doing now, and set yourself up for success in the fall.
So, what is that intent?
Let’s start with this; It’s incredibly difficult to make profound physiological improvements in your underlying, base-level fitness during cross season.
Can you and should you get faster during the course of a season?
Absolutely. But…
You race hard every weekend. If you’re doing it right, you’re spending most of the following week recovering from the weekend past & getting opened up for the weekend next.
You can do some small work mid-week to improve deficiencies or hone strengths, but you really can’t do the kind of work that it takes to bump your FTP enough to get to the front of the group you raced in last season, to be competitive at the next category level , or to win one of those races you’ve been sooo close in for sooo long.
The kind of work we’re talking about is the sort that if you did it on a Wednesday, you’d be way off the back come the weekend, and that’s assuming you could take a day off to do it mid-week and still be free to race on the weekend.
Sound likely? I didn’t think so.
Now, though? No such problems.
Want to be stronger this cross season? Spend your weekends for the next month or so doing long, hard, fast training rides.
This isn’t long, slow distance eating we’re talking about, this is “Oh crap, how the hell am I going to finish this ride” kinda stuff. These are the rides where you barely manage to drag your ass in the door of your house when you get home. The rides where, when you get home you need to drink a coke to summon the energy needed to order takeout.
4, 5, 6 hours of glorious suffering. That’s what we’re talking about.
Try one this Saturday. Then wake up Sunday, do it again. Give me a few weeks of this, and you’ll be really, really strong.
Then we can start to work on making you fast…
M
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Looking for a cycling coach? Click the banner, check out the site, and drop me a line at mhill@source-e.net
Hopefully you aren’t stuck in bed sick as a dog, as it seems so many are. Blecch.
What you do for workouts this week is pretty darn dependent on when you’re racing, so hey… how about some options?
(Fair warning… I give myself license to contradict the following schedule with newer postings later on in the week.)
To be fair, I probably should have posted this up in the middle of last week, but hey; last week I was the one in the hospital, so I plead extenuating circumstances!
Honestly, given that it’s after 11:00 West Coast time, I’m going to assume that most of you have already done your workout for today, and talk briefly about something else.
About being smart.
Hey, it’s less than a week to go before Nationals, and in much of the country the weather is absolutely atrocious. And we’re in the middle of a flu epidemic.
And I keep reading about people doing stupid s**t like going for long rides in freezing rain and – surprise! – winding up sick.
So, hey… dummy?
Don’t do that.
OK?
You’re almost there.
You can survive a couple/few days of short workouts on the trainer.
Really, you can.
Maybe queue this up on the computer while you do so…
And hey… if you still haven’t done your workout today?
Try this (on the trainer, of course…)
The MB15 –
Warm up well. (Seriously. Warm up for this one, it’ll help.)
The basic idea here is to do a series of very short efforts with very little rest between them, for a pretty long period of time.
Sound confusing?
Here’s how it breaks down…
Warm up.
Get set…
Go!
15 seconds on
15 seconds off
15 seconds on
15 seconds off
…and so on and so on for the duration of the interval.
How long are you going to do this for?
– Ten minutes would be great.
Three -four sets, 5 minutes between sets.
How hard do you go during the “on” segments?
– Pretty darn hard.
You’re familiar with the level of effort you put out in your 2×20’s by now, right?
You need to go harder than that.
A fair bit harder would be good.
Ideally, you’ll hit these on periods at right about 150% of your FTP, if that’s a number that means anything to you. If it doesn’t, it’s harder than what you’re dong your 2×20 effort at. A fair bit harder.
Like I said, “ouch.”
How easy do you go during the “off” segments?
– A lot easier, but you aren’t quite soft pedaling.
Right about 50% of your FTP, or half as hard as your 2×20 level.
Again, ouch.
Want to know the real “Ouch”?
Ultimately, you want to be able to do 6 sets of these, or 3 sets twenty minutes each, or however many it takes to equal the duration of your races.
Well, crap. Internet went down this morning, so this is going up late. Sorry about that.
In the interest of getting something up as quickly as possible, here’s the plan for today:
Do something race-like.
Kind of.
Short, but race like.
If your race day at Nationals is 60 minutes, today you should endeavor to do a race-like effort (on the cross bike, on cross-race like terrain… you know, race-like) of approximately half that duration, at equal to or greater output.
So, half as long as a race, but as hard or harder than what you would do in an actual race.
Go really damn hard for half as long.
Pretty simple, eh?
Go to it.
(of course, if you’ve actually got racing in your area – like you live in Dallas – you should go do that.)
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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