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Opening Up for the Big Day
How to fine tune your form leading up to an event
One of the most difficult things to get a cyclist to do is sacrifice
some training in exchange for better performance on race day. It sounds
like a contradiction, and one I've mentioned here before; if you want
to get faster, train hard and often, right? But when you approach an important
event, sacrificing some training in the middle of the week in exchange
for better performance on the weekend is exactly the approach to take.
A normal schedule might be sprints on Tuesdays, intervals on Wednesdays,
and a long day on Thursday. Follow that with perhaps two days of racing
on the weekend, a light workout on Saturday followed by a race on Sunday,
or maybe group rides both days. In any case, you might notice that you
feel better on the second day of training or racing, even if you find
you finish the first day somewhat tired. Many riders feel flat on Saturday
and are surprised to find themselves riding much better on Sunday.
The phenomenon here is that when you dig deep to get through three days
of training during the week, you're body will sometimes go into deep recovery
mode when you take your rest day on Friday. On your first hard day back,
the rest day will have left you feeling like a car that's been sitting
in the driveway too long. It's takes some running through before it really
goes well again. Your body reacts the same way. It can take a workout
before all your energy systems are activated and you feel good on the
bike again.
Another risk is that if you've had a hard early week, you might find you
need more than one day to recover. That can leave you going into Saturday's
race or hard workout still not 100%. If it's a training ride, it's simple
enough to realize that and head home. If it's a racing situation, the
last thing you want to have to deal with is dropping out because you've
over trained (or under rested) during the week. Finishing the event, however,
might set you up for a cycle of racing tired that's hard to get out of
once it's started.
If your weekend events aren't particularly important you might decide
in the long term that training is more valuable than your racing performance.
In that case you can train through the week as planned, knowing that Friday's
rest day before the weekend might leave you feeling a little blocked on
Saturday. In that case you're also accepting the risk that you might not
be fully recovered by Saturday. You have to know how you're currently
riding and how well you've been recovering to be able to calculate how
much of a risk it is. I find that in the early season when you're fresh
and the training is primarily aerobic, it's not such a big risk. Later
in the season when you're recovery system is slowing down but your racing
days are more frequent, the risk increases.
If, however, you have important races on the weekend that you really want
to be fresh and riding well for, but you haven't planned them as a specific
peak in your season, you can still tweak your schedule a bit to make the
most out of the form you have.
The first step is to be sure to fully and completely recover from the
weekend before. If that normally takes one day, in this case you want
to give yourself two. 1-2 hours easy on Monday and Tuesday is all you
should do, so that on Tuesday's ride you're absolutely confident that
you're completely healed from the weekend.
Wednesday, then, will be your only real training day of the week. How
long and how hard the ride will be will depend on your ability level.
Whatever it is, you should be fit enough at this point to complete a fair
amount of work in every heart rate zone. A 2-4 hour ride including 30-60
minutes at 80-90% of LT, 30-60 minutes at 93-95% of LT, and a small number
of sprints should be enough to allow you to maintain your fitness level
and recover in one day. A training race works well for this, provided
you make a concerted effort not to do any anaerobic work. Anaerobic training
always includes the risk of muscle damage and extra recovery time, and
that's a risk you don't want to take this week. If you do a training race,
sit in.
Thursday, as you might expect, will be your recovery day. This allows
you a rest day two days before the weekend, and gives you Friday as the
key optional day.
On Friday you'll ideally be recovered enough to do a light workout to
open up for the weekend. You don't need to do a lot: 1-2 hours, with 15-30
minutes at 80-90% of LT, accompanied by 3-5 high rpm sprints. You want
to finish the workout feeling better than when you started, but stop it
just before you start to feel tired. If you head out for this workout
and realize that you're not fully recovered from Wednesday you can still
do the duration of the ride, but without any intensity. By resting on
Thursday, you've programmed in this cushion just in case you needed the
extra recovery before the weekend.
With this approach, you'll only end up with 3 hard days of training and
racing and one day of light opening up work, as opposed to 5 solid hard
days on. In the big picture, it's clearly not a big sacrifice and won't
put a big dent in your training. What it will do is leave you with just
a little extra juice going into the weekend and hopefully give you the
edge you're looking for in an important event.
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