Summer has arrived, and with it has come the cycling race/event season. Finally!
You’ve spent the last several months building your aerobic engine, strength and pedaling skills. Now it’s time to put all these training hours and all this work to use.
Much of your off-season training time was spent adding volume and slowly increasing intensity. Your fitness level should be good, and once you’re into your race season, a few slight changes are in order.
Training now should be specific to your race requirements. Intensity should be high……race effort or above. This hard work should be balanced with a significant amount of rest.
Think of your training right now as a light switch; it should be either “on” or “off,” with very little time spent in the middle. Cyclists generally have little problem with the “on” part of training….the “hard” part. What we have more trouble with is the “off” part.
Keep in mind that you improve when you rest. If you continue to ride hard all the time, you run the risk of injury, burnout and overall fatigue. Be resting, you’ll come into every quality ride fresh and ready to put out a great effort. If you train with power, you should notice your average power increasing, and if you train with heart rate your power/speed at a given heart rate should be higher.
Structuring your weekly training to include 2 or 3 quality rides (rather than 4 or 5), each separated by a couple days, should help you sharpen your form and help you peak for your key events.
So ride all-out, and then recover fully. Do this and you’ll be better than ever! Add your comments below, then GET OUT AND RIDE!
Ride Recap:
Yesterday’s ride included 6 hill repeats on my 5-6 minute hill at VO2 Max level effort. I followed this with 2 more repeats in a Big Gear (40-50 rpm) at sub-threshold effort.
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