Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Base Training

After taking a rest week and being sick for over a week, it's good timing for me to write about training.  I know most everyone reading this, and most everyone that rides period, does so around a normal life, family and work.  So hopefully some of the training strategy that's worked for me over the years may help some of you out as well.  The "good timing" is because I can remind myself at the same time that I really have gotten in some solid training so far this year even though it didn't feel that way this past week.

Sept - Nov - I had a really long off season this year and haven't done a race in 6 months now.  After Leadville in August, I spent the next 3 months without any road riding and did whatever mountain bike rides I felt like.  On average that was about 2 rides per week with just a few random hard efforts and long rides thrown in.

December - In December my goal was simply to be more consistent and I was getting in 4 rides per week with one long one (5+ hours) on the weekend plus doing a pretty solid core workout twice a week.

Jan endurance block - after a week off the bike over the Christmas Holiday I took advantage of some extra time off work for New Years and did a really big endurance block.  In 8 days I rode about 30 hours with about 40,000ft of climbing.

Doing a focused block of rides like that every couple of months can give you some really good results compared to smaller incremental changes that you might see when keeping a similar routine week after week.   It's probably not a good idea for most people to have a huge jump in volume like I did, but I know from experience that my body reacts to the endurance rides really well.  If I were doing multiple days of hard intervals in a week I would personally have to be a lot more careful to not over do it.  But doing a similar training block like this at however many hours is a stretch for you can give big improvements.  Our it might be an intensity block right before your racing season starts.  Either way it's a good strategy to consider and can be balanced well with work if you do 2 big weekend, rides, 2-3 weekday rides, then 2 more big weekend rides, followed by the rest period.

The training period / block I work with most is a 2 week stretch, followed by 5-6 easy days.  I find this a lot easier to focus on compared to a 3 week training block that a lot of people go by.  It's better to be focused, and push a little harder for 2 weeks, compared to stretching things out for 3 weeks.  I follow-it up with a 5-6 day rest week and repeat.

Late Jan - The 2nd half of January I did 2 solid weeks of about 15 hours with a focus on endurance and introduced a little intensity with short power intervals one day per week and some tempo climbing on one of my big weekend rides.

Early Feb - The first half of February was another solid 2 week block at about 16 hours per week with my weekday intensity ride being some VO2 climbing repeats on the mountain bike and my other key rides being a hard tempo road ride on the Saturdays followed by a really big mountain bike ride on both Sundays.

Late Feb - After my rest / sick week it's time for 2 more weeks of building before the racing starts.  My intensity days will focus on efforts right around my threshold with one more real big endurance ride the first weekend and then tapering down to a more moderate endurance ride the 2nd week.

Then it's time to put it all together on race day!

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