That tells me that you need to do longer intervals. Yeah, I said that nasty 'I' word. Sustained power. How many watts were you putting out before you popped? Maintain 10w less than that (or so) for as long as you can (or 12min whichever comes first) recover for 5min and do it 2x more. HTH M BTW my 'coaching fee' is beer and pizza. You owe me.
Hey guys and gals. Just joined the forum. I'd like to share a couple of my bike related projects. I started this board tracker in NYC as a personal project during late winter of last year. I think it was the kind of month where it feels like spring is never going to come and you get a little stir crazy. This board tracker was a great distraction And finally bike parking in my shop.... http://vimeo.com/23496837 Great forum you have here, I just picked up a Yamaha XT 600 and am looking forward to making some tracks. Tyler
I once had the extreme good fortune to go for a run with with the Kenya hurdling team, the team they send to the olympics. :huh You want to talk about 'in shape'. In between bouts of wanting to die, I asked them for some training tips. They said 'run 8 miles every day. If you have good wind for 8 miles you'll have amazing wind for 500 meters.' Taken as a general strategy, it's good advice.
We also had a bunch of guys who ran in college and water polo,etc.I think that competitive running is soo much closer to the AT and that's the level you become comfortable with. Then switch to cycling, the power that is needed comes fairly quickly. As for your speed in we need to get you motopacing .It WILL make you faster and able to maintain that 27-30 mph in races and breaks. The wify may be willing to do it in that she's done it a lot before. If not I'll muddle thru.
Ridge, do you train alone or with a team or friend? I was with a team that only wanted to do race simulation training. Basically, leave the parking lot and try to kill each other with no regard to noobs or the women of the group. SO I made it my pet project to always go back and pull them forward (if they could) and go back to business. That along with training on my own, I became a decent time trialist. Pulling guys and girls back all the sudden go harder. That is when I found out the click part of the team found it humorous to to a 4 man TTT on the front to make sure I couldn't pull anyone back. The only problem they had was, the combined 4 couldn't out-run me. For them it was race simulation, for me it was long interval work and it did me well. In the spring I start out 1x1, 3 sets of 5 (one minute on, one minute off) with 5 minutes rest between. Then every week or two, up the numbers, 2x2 then 3x3, 4x4 then start to change it up and go 5x4, 6x4. On some work outs after being acclimated to the stress, I'd do 10x10 or 20x20 until failure. If you do it with a friend of unequal abilities adjust what you are doing. Carl and I would workouts but he was always behind. So we stated doing 2 man TT workouts and each others recovery was in the draft of the other and it didn't workout too bad. Other times I'd give him a 1 second head start and we'd try to catch or evade the other. Another good one Josh and I do, he drafts me while I do the interval. Just trying to stay in the draft is a huge workout for him (cat 5) and no one gets left behind. If we're doing a hill ride I always go to the front and give the others a chance to sit in and rest while I kill myself. This year though has been tough, I lost a lot of fitness over the winter laid up from back surgery so now I am starting to feel like my old self and find myself at the front more often. Don't forget to do jumps, slow to around 18mph then slam it until your computer shows no more accelleration, hold that for a few seconds then coast back to 18, recover and repeat. You can also try the vomitron. Warm up for 20 minutes minimum. Slow down and recover until your heart rate comes down to excited but not watching tv. Come to a complete stop, wait about 1 minute or two then go full tilt, max speed for 1 minute, then settle into race pace for 10 minutes. Ride easy 20 minutes then stop and do it again until you can't see straight or puke. I did do one last workout with that team and showed up on my track bike (freewheeled). I was laughed at and made fun of for attempting it and told it was going to suck to be me. If sucking meant winning all the sprints and being 1st over the biggest hill, then I guess it sucked. I was invited to ride with Orrville Cycling Team and felt like I fit right in. They also do too much hammering but the attitudes were much better and there is an A, B and C group and we actually rode real hills. The difference, one was a race team lead by 4 guys who wanted the team for themselves and no A,B,C (tried but was shot down), the other is a club with a race team. I like them enough I ended up being Club VP and some of the cyclotourist on that club are freaky strong! Guys that never race ride with the A's and ride strong.
We did kind of the same thing ,but not so cruelly. We split the team in to strongest riders and weaker/older riders. The Weaker group would have stronger guy or two.the strong group would be all really strong guys. They give us a 5 min head start .For us it was see how far we could go untill they caught us ,we would go harder than we thought possible.It was a pride thing. For them it was also a pride thing to catch us asap . When they caught us we would have to hang on. till we got to our rally point.Good training,every body got a great workout and noone felt slighted.
The guys that I rode with Wed are the 'freaky strong but don't race' type. (so'm I right now ) I still have delusions of racing and am aiming at Cross season. I'm fixin to start a lot of 90sec all out kinda efforts interspersed with recovering at zone 3 or better. :sigh I miss track racing. All the short, really really hard efforts you want, all the 'try it once and if it don't work, try something else' kinda training, and Madisons. Mmmm madison racing. I useta could outsprint lots of folks sitting down... M
When I tried to divide the 1st team into 2 groups, I did it similarly but somewhat evenly matched and like your group, one got a head start. The goal was that neither team was allowed to drop any riders in the chase/being chased groups. Our biggest issue was the A riders following them and trying to fubar things like jumping in the pace lines then attacking and trying to blow things apart. I found them to be quite juvenile in their actions for a bunch of profession engineers and certified yuppies. One of those riders did an attack from the middle of a pace line while riding with a different team and took the rider behind him down and broke his hip.
I tried to talk one of our locals, Chuck Knot, into racing, he wasn't interested. Then last summer he went to the National 24 hour challenge in Michigan and set the national record in the 55-59 age group :huh Now his son is hooked and they are going for the family title. btw, he's also a former distance runner
Yea we had mostly miltary, and what the road boss said was law. A bunch of the guys were SEAL's ,and trust me on this. they had nothing to prove to anybody. They would not give up period,They could be dying. You'd never know it,
A structured schedule really worked well for me when I raced. I did the Lemond/ really Cyril Guimard(sp) training routine. Now there are loads of them online. The good thing is you know what your going to do every day, no guess work.
I tried Jacob Fetty at Fetty Concepts which was a good program but it had one major flaw, it didn't take into account things like Wives, kids, life, etc!!! Actually it did but when you have something like that you tend to want to stick to it without letting life get in the way. All kidding aside, they are good to follow, especially if you tend to over-train. Rest is important and some people tend to go even harder when feeling good and dig themselves into a hole, not only in training but trying to race every weeknight crit and weekend race they can. I was told at my age (47) to only build 3 weeks, go easy a week.
Hey, that sounds like Ridge. Just kidding. Racing and the training that's required really eats up your time, and other parts of your life suffer.Racing when I raced was very competitive even at the local level (training races,etc.). It's only gotten much more so. It was really like a part time job,I spent at least 18 hours a week on the bike, this time of year it was more maybe 20-25 hrs.
Eh? could be!! I've seen how much he's been posting and threw that in, not as a dig, but as a tidbit of info to think about. A few years back a pro told me when he was in Europe there were so many races you could almost race every day. He said that was the fastest way to burnout. That is why I've haven't done much racing or training. If I go to Moto-x or a big Dual Sport practice Saturday, I feel too dead to race Sunday and vice-versa.
I'm working of Friel's stuff. Seems to work. ...and yeah, its nice to know what your ride is supposed to be before you go out. For example: today is 3hrs zone 2 with 4 x 90sec intervals at zone 5 with 4min rest in between Yeah, they hurt, but if Wed is any indication, I need it M
I train, and race, alone 95% of the time. I'm on a team but there are only three active racers and the other two have no interest in training together even though we are all very close in ability. I have been invited to other, bigger teams with a more structured riding and training schedule but I get thrown under the bus and put on a guilt trip from my current team every time I bring it up for deserting a team I helped to start. But I digress... I have to admit my interval work has been nearly non-existent. Not because I don't want to do it, but because I don't know where to start according to my needs and abilities. I have a good, stable sprint and I can spin a high cadence easily. My cornering is better than most due to my experience with motos. I almost always sit either on the front or try to stay about 5th - 10th wheel (which I can almost always do without much effort). My biggest weakness is when breakaways happen. I can usually break with them, but cannot sustain for long enough to stay away. My sprint to break is well over 30mph, but I have to recover down to about 24-25 with 4 or 5 guys in rotation to maintain. I can usually do this once during any given race and be fine. It's when the attacks come regularly that I start to hit the wall. Not having a team to counter the attacks so I can sit in for a bit is what pisses me off. I know it just means I need to become that much stronger, but it still sucks. I have contacted a couple of cycling coaches in the area to see what their fee structures are and what they think of my performance needs. In the meantime, I'll try your workouts and see what kind of efforts I can hold. I probably do race too often, but I just enjoy it so much. I don't have the kids and my wife supports whatever I decide to throw myself into. I just got into this last year, so I am very uneducated in the structure of training, peaking, etc. Until now, I could "race" myself into shape and be competitive. I'm hitting a plateau though and it's very frustrating. So, it looks like I owe you and GUMMEE some beer-n-pizza...
I have an older Ultimate stand. I really like it. However, the adjustable clamp that adjusts the height has broken. They used to use some kind of composite that became brittle over time. I just use a hose clamp in its place, now. The new ones use a different style clamp from different material. Also, the newer stands have a different head on them. Mine has started to sag, from a lot of use. The new ones are much more durable and better designed. I do the same thing, when I'm out on the gravel roads. ^^^ I'm with you, on this one. I've had three different bike fits, on three different bikes, from three different people. On all three bikes, I've ended up somewhere totally different from where they were set at. One bike ended up getting sold, as it was way too big.....what does that say about fit from the that shop? I've ridden enough miles, now, that I pretty much know where I need to be on positioning of the cockpit. I never worry about my fore/aft position, as it relates to the BB. YMMV.
Don't owe me anything, just do your best and be as professional as you can be. I'm taking it since you're starting up you are either a cat 4 or 5. If so, there are many things to remember, you still have to develop parts of your cycling ability that others who have been picking the class have been developing for years. The team I left had guys on it that have been cat 4's since the 80's, back before there was a cat 5 field and 4's were the true beginners!! One finally upgraded to Cat 3 after many people flat out started calling him a cherry picker. The other has won the cat 4 state road races 3 or 4 times and has never been made to up grade thank you USAC!!! The shorter intense intervals will help you with the repeated attacks, the longer ones will help you sustain the break. Motorpacing is good too if you have a friend with a moto. FOllow behind at a race pace and periodically poke your head out into the wind then get back in and rest.
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