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You Gotta Have A PlanAuthor: Adam Hodges MyersonIn the decade I spent racing full-time and in the past few years I’ve worked as a coach, the month of January has always stood out as the most dynamic, and perhaps most important of the season. In normal winters I would have a week or two off at the holidays to recover from cyclo-cross season and head somewhere warm for road racing in February. Some years I went to Europe after 'cross nationals and raced another 6 weeks without a break. Now I'm a year-round New Englander and plan to spend the next month Nordic skiing before I begin structured road training. Wherever you live, there's something about the winter solstice passing and days getting longer in January that says it's time to get serious. Serious can mean different things to different people, so before you throw a leg over the bike, you've got to decide what exactly it is you're going to get serious about. You need to have a plan. Designing your winter training plan is like building a bridge. You know where you are now, and you know where you want to be once the racing season starts. You need to come up with the infrastructure that's going to let you cross that gap. We can start that construction process by focusing on the endpoints first. Where exactly are you right now, and where exactly do you want to be? Where you are now can vary dramatically depending where you live and when you stopped racing. For some, the road or mountain bike season might have ended in September or October, and you may not have touched the bike since. Others may have taken a short break and then started an off-season period of easy riding and perhaps some time in the gym. More and more of you likely had a full season of cyclo-cross that kept you very fit all fall – perhaps with a peak for Nationals in mid-December – followed by the past few weeks completely off. However you got here, it's important to make a separation between what you've been doing, and what you're about to start. Look back at your past 3 months of training, evaluate your progress and put parentheses around the completed phase. You want to view the period a whole and make a clean break. Next, look across the gorge and decide just how large that span is. Consider your local, regional, or national racing calendar and ask yourself a couple of important questions, working backwards: When do I want to peak and be in top form? When will I start racing? When will the weather allow me to train outdoors? With the answers to those questions you can answer the most important one: how many weeks do I have between now and these points? Let's assume that no matter what you've been doing this fall, you're starting your new program in early January. Perhaps where you live, training outdoors on your bike will be difficult this time of year. Your racing season begins with training races in March, more important races in April, and you want to peak for a series of criteriums in May or perhaps a stage race in June. With this we've got the general outline of the structure we want to build, and now it's time to pour some concrete. • First will be a pre-season that starts now and lasts 4-6 weeks, consisting of cross training like Nordic skiing, running, gym work, and riding when the weather's good. This phase is about staying fit and having fun, without worrying much about riding your bike. Enjoy many different activities and build your fitness as a whole. (If you live in a warm climate where the racing starts early, you might skip this phase altogether.) • Second will be a base cycle, again of 4-6 weeks, which will take you to the first training races in March. In this phase you would cut back on cross training and ride your bike as much as possible, indoors and out. You can still lift to work on strength and compensate for bad weather and short days. Your on-the-bike training should be in the form of steady, light intensity intervals of 15-30 minutes, and middle intensity, threshold intervals of 5-20 minutes. • Third will be a second base cycle of 8-12 weeks that will take you to the end of your aerobic build up and into those criteriums in May. This is where you hit the limits of the light and middle intensity intervals you'll need to be competitive during the season.• Fourth will be an in-season cycle where you add more anaerobic intensity and lots of racing, taking you to your stage race in June. This phase lasts as long as you can keep good form rolling by recovering fully between races. This plan gives the basic data to build a blueprint for passage from darkest winter to spring and summer fitness. There's obviously still much to consider: what do I do each day, how long should my workouts be, what should my intervals look like, what gearing should I use, etc. With this plan you can at least view each segment of your season's training, and with future articles we will guide you through the training – and racing – to come.. |
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