Workout Wednesday – Bike Race Simulation!

Proper bicycle training prepares your legs, your lungs and your mind to race, and you’ve spent hours and hours doing just that.  However, nothing prepares you for a race more than a race.  So today, let’s prepare you for the specific demands of a race, whether it will be on your road or mountain bike.

Find a circular course or trail that takes you 15-20 minutes to complete 1 lap.  The ideal course will include short hills and at least 1 longer hill, some technical aspects to it (such as single track, obstacles or technical corners) and a good finishing straight.

If this is a road course it should have very little traffic and should be free of stoplights and stop signs.  If it’s a mountain bike course, the technical difficulty of the course should be within your comfort zone of bike handling skills.  It should be challenging, but not dangerous.  Remember, safety first.

Since this will be an all-out race effort, a thorough warm up will be important. 

WARMUP: 

• 5 minutes easy spin.  Heart rate should come up gradually.
• 5 x 1 minute “fast pedal” drills (110+ rpm), each followed by 1 minute easy spin recovery
• 5 minute sub-threshold effort.  This is warm-up only, so don’t overdo the effort.  The purpose is to warm up your muscles, open blood vessels and raise your heart rate, not to have you tired out for the main part of the ride.
• 5 minute easy spin recovery

MAIN SET:

• You know the course so plan your strategy, keeping in mind this is a race effort.  There should be no backing down anywhere on the loop.  Attack the shorter hills, making sure to power up and over the hills and accelerating on the back side. 
• Depending on the length of the long hill, you should ride it at threshold or above.  The common tendency is to back off at the top of the hill and recover, but this won’t happen in a race, so practice powering up and over the top and riding hard on the back side of the hill.
• Plan and practice your entrance and exits through the technical portions and increase your speed as you become more proficient
• Remember the race-winning move I passed along to you on an earlier post?  Use it here.  It includes the following:
  • Begin with a 30 second acceleration at VO2 Max level effort (:15 standing/:15 seated
  • Following this separation move, continue for 3 minutes at threshold
  • Finish with an all-out 10 second sprint

Start your race simulations with 1 loop and progress to a total of 3 loops.  Take a 10 minute soft-pedal recovery between each loop.

COOLDOWN:

• Ride easy for 5-10 minutes or more.  Spin in a small gear with low pressure to flush your legs.  This will have been a very tough ride.  If it wasn’t, you need to ride harder and/or more loops.  A race effort should leave you pretty well spent.  As such, you may be ready to call it a day at this point.  If so, that’s great, it was a fantastic ride.  But if you feel up to it, you may add some additional z2-3 endurance riding to finish it up.

This race simulation can be done alone or with training partners.  If you ride alone, be sure to time your laps and aim for improvement as you progress through the season.  If you ride with others, they should be comparable in ability to you, or slightly stronger.  Challenge yourself and each other.  You’ll have a blast!

Add any comments below, and contact me with any questions.  After you do so, GET OUT AND RIDE!