So you think you want to race? Part 4: The Training Calendar

Hopefully you’ve made it through your first several group rides without killing yourself or anyone else.  Maybe you even made it to the end of the ride without getting dropped once or twice.  Definitely, you should have become a lot more familiar with the dynamic of riding in a pack.  The more you keep your eyes and ears open, the more quickly you will pick up stuff that will make you a better, more competitive and certainly safer bike racer.  In the next few installments, we’ll focus on the different topics you’ll need to consider as you approach your first race.

In the transition from being a bike rider to would-be bike racer, you’ve focused a little more on your equipment and your bike handling and bike racing culture and a bunch of different things, but one fact can’t be overlooked: in bike racing, the fittest and fastest guys usually win the race.  There are a lot of sports out there that let you get away with being a bit rusty.  In my experience, cycling is not one of them.  You need to be pretty diligent about training.

There are as many different training plans and philosophies as there are people to develop them.  The point of this article is not to be a full blown training plan, but to introduce some of the concepts that you’ll need to be familiar with in order to be a better educated consumer of training material.

Almost every training philosophy encompasses the idea that training throughout the year is a dynamic rather than constant thing.  The analogy I most often hear is the pyramid – build a big enough base and the peak of the pyramid can be really high.  So throughout the year you are going to transition from building that base to seeing how high you can make the peak.

A lot of golfers calibrate their games by figuring out which club they hit for a 150 yard shot and move up or down from there.  Cyclists do a similar thing with an effort level called threshold.  Threshold is loosely defined as the maximum effort you can hold for an hour.  There are a bunch of varying definitions but if you think of it like that, you’ll get what anyone’s talking about.  Defining your threshold is pretty easy if you have a power meter (and I am not going to touch the value judgment of whether someone who’s never raced should have a power meter) or a heart rate monitor with a recording function.  It needs to be done when you are well rested and well hydrated, with no surplus stress in your life.  Find a place to ride that has few to no interruptions in it.  If you are like me, this place is called the living room – on a trainer.  Warm up for about 20 minutes and get a good sweat going, and be sure to throw in a couple of minutes of uncomfortably hard riding.  Then take three or four minutes to just spin fast with no load on the pedals.  Next, do a 30 minute time trial, riding as hard as you can for 30 minutes.  Your goal is to produce a reasonably constant effort level throughout, but start out maybe a bit softer than you think you can hold, as the test is worthless if you blow up 15 minutes in.  It’s okay to gradually increase your effort.  If you are using a power meter, take your average power for the 30 minutes.  If you are using a heart rate monitor, take the average of the last 20 minutes of the time trial.  Multiply that number (either power or heart rate) by .95, and you have a very close approximation of your threshold.  If you didn’t absolutely blow up either during or at the very end of this time trial, retest yourself in a few days when you are once again well rested.  You can probably go harder than you did.

Continue reading

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Also in this series:
So you think you want to race? Part 1: Questions demanding honest answers
So you think you want to race? Part 2: Your first group ride
So you think you want to race? Part 3: Han Solo or Attack of the Clones

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David Kirkpatrick captained the NCVC Cat 4 team in 2008 and saw 6 of his teammates upgrade to Cat 3, due in no small part to teamwork, strategy, planning and a lot of the other stuff David writes about here. You can follow some of his less structured rants about cycling at flamencochuckwagon.blogspot.com.