|
|
You Can Take It With You!
How not to ruin your form on the road
Memorial Day is fast approaching, and that means one of the biggest weekends
for bike racing in America. Whether it’s the Tour of Somerville in
the Northeast, or maybe Snake Alley in the Midwest, this weekend is one
where many riders make what might be their first big road trip of the
year.
That, of course, means travel. Whether it’s time in the car or maybe
on a plane, travel means potential time off the bike, sitting in cramped
positions, breathing recycled air and eating less than ideal food. I shared
many hotels with former pro Alan McCormack, and his refrain was always
the same; the race itself is easy, it’s getting there that’s
the hard part.
He might have been simplifying things, but he had a point; the racing
is hard, but it’s something you prepare and train for. Traveling
is something you do secondarily and is often out of your control; it’s
obviously not going to make you stronger to sit in a car for 6 hours.
What many riders miss is how much the traveling can take away from your
performance, and how much they need to consider it as part of their race
preparation.
The most important rule in my book is that a travel day is absolutely
not a recovery day. You might be forced to schedule rest days before an
event as travel days, but you should never consider the post-race travel
days as recovery. Those days of travel need recovery days as well.
If you have a big event on a weekend where you’ll be racing Saturday
and Sunday, but traveling all day or evening on Friday, you’ll ideally
want to rest on Thursday. If you try to cram another day of training in
right up to the day you have to leave for the race, you’ll leave
yourself trying unsuccessfully to recover from your workouts will sitting
folded in half in your car eating rest stop food like Twizzlers and drinking
Mountain Dew (one of my favorite road trip meals). An easy day Thursday
will make sure your body’s on top of things and ready to handle a
long day in the car.
If you end up driving all night on Sunday or even through the day Monday
to get home from an event and lose a day of training, don’t try to
begin right back with your workouts on Tuesday. A hard weekend of racing
combined with what might be a bad short night of sleep in the back seat
of the car is almost always going to require a second day of recovery
before you’ll be ready to go again. Playing it safe and giving yourself
until Wednesday is a long term investment in your form, since you’re
not lowering the risk of training tired on Tuesday.
If you’ve got a multiple day drive, the kind that might take you
home from an early season spent in warm climate or maybe your yearly trek
to Nationals, you can take one of two approaches. One school says it’s
best to go full blast, drive through the night with no stops and no traffic,
taking turns driving with your traveling partners to get home or to the
race as soon as possible and get your life back to normal. The sooner
the better to begin your recovery.
I believe that style has it’s place, but prefer a more Kerouak-type
approach. I think it’s best to travel with as little impact on your
riding and health as possible. That means sleeping until you get up, going
for a short training ride wherever it is you put your head down that night,
and then hitting the road in the early afternoon. Then, you can drive
until the evening or try to make it to a particular city where you know
you can get a cheap hotel or some host housing, and then go for another
easy ride in the morning after you wake up. This is the approach that
worked for me when I was racing full-time and making long drives from
event to event. While that might not be realistic for those who are in
a rush to get back to work as soon as possible, in that case you likely
took a plane and were home in bed the same night of the race.
Take the time you spend traveling seriously and give it the respect it
deserves. Little things like packing a cooler of your own food, buying
water instead of soda at rest stops, and having games to play or books
to read to stave off the snacking that boredom encourages will go a long
way. Extra rest before you go, and extra recovery when you return will
help you hold on to the form you worked so hard to build for the event
your traveling to in the first place. Don’t let a mismanaged or underestimated
day of traveling crack you before you even put a foot to the pedals.
|
