How many weeks of a peak?

thekgb

despite the spam i'm still a regular reader of the forum and get quite a bit of helpful info from it and want to thank all the regular contributors up front. In light of various circumstances (work, kids, life, etc you all know the story) i've been trying to pick out a period to peak for the year but have come up with some timing issues.

after looking over the schedule I'll have about 4 months of road racing on the calendar. fortunately or unfortunately, most of the races i'll be doing will be 2 weeks or more apart, and primarily crits. RR's ,unless they're really close, require me to be gone for a whole day so usually it aint gonna happen. I figure, using the crits i can get the most bang for my buck (ie: i can attend many more of them compared to RR's, so i'll focus my training around them to get the best chance for a good result) i've been thinking about trying to extend my peak over the course of 4-6 weeks so i can get 3 or 4 races in the "peak'. I'd hate to just build everything around only one weekend of crit (s), or an hour or two of racing.

i've re-read the 'to peak or not to peak' thread which was awesome and has stayed on my 'bookmark' for months. what i've taken from it is if i "choose to accept this mission" i should try to get a solid CTL/aerobic engine built (for what i can tolerate) and try to use that to maintain myself over the course of a month or more with some CTL "spending" to help focus on building the L5/6 work while getting more near the peak (6 weeks or so). the question is: can you make a peak last for 4-6 weeks? i realize that even after a peak for just one weekend i won't turn into a pumpkin, but i'd like to strike while the iron is hot, it's just it may be two or more weeks from when i did peak.

thanks ahead of time for any help.

Mike

daveryanwyoming

Mike,
There are peaks and peaks. IOW, you can let your CTL fall fairly rapidly, stress high end work and hit a peak that might give you your best results of the season but a couple to maybe three weeks is all you might get out of it before you start to run out of base. Or you could back off a bit in terms of weekly TSS, try not to let CTL fall too rapidly with a combo of some high end work and some SST and be relatively fresh for a longer window before you start to run out of base.

Yeah it depends on a lot of things including how deep you've built your training base(how high your CTL is), the mix of training leading up to your key races, how your body responds to stress and how fast it recovers, etc. Tactically it also depends on how important each race is. Do you train right through some races and really focus on others or are they all equally important?

A typical strategy is to pick out a couple or a few important races that are close together. Call those your A events and plan to spend some CTL peaking for best performance in those events. Call the others your B events and train right through them or perhaps do a very slight mini-taper for some of them to gain a bit of freshness on race day.

Even if you've transitioned to high end L5/L6/L7 work prior to your racing season it can pay to move back to SST work during periods of heavy racing. That's especially true if your races are crits and you don't add some training after those relatively short events. The SST work can help stabilize or even rebuild CTL during periods of heavy racing when you should be getting a fair amount of high end work in the races themselves.

I don't know of any hard and fast rules for how long you can sustain a peak and it depends in part on how high a peak you're hoping for but I'd be surprised if you could maintain a real high peak for four or more weeks. The good news is that it's possible to have good race results and even podium spots during times when you're not on a true peak. Sure, it's great when everything comes together and you feel super strong, but with solid base fitness it's not unusual to have good B races as well.

Good luck,
-Dave