How do you train more and keep your legs fresh?

beison

I'm pretty new to the whole racing scene, but I'm really pumped about improving. This is my first season racing collegiate, and after 7 races I've had 4 top 5 finishes and moved up a category. I'm really looking forward to the summer season, and have a goal of upgrading to Cat 3's by September.

To get to this peak, I know I need to put in a lot of hours of training, with a lot of hard, high intensity intervals. I've looked up a bunch of info on training, and I think I understand most of the principals of rest days, hard riding, recovery spins, eating right after a ride and then eating enough to recover lost calories ect... The one thing I'm confused with however, is how I can increase my volume of training. I'm doing a solid 8-10 hours of training per week, plus a road race, and a crit every weekend. Once school's over, I'll have time to do a little more training, but every time I try to increase my training load, my body feels burned out and going on what info is on the web, that means I should take a rest day, limiting the amount/intensity of training I can do that day.

I'll give an example of my past training week, and maybe you guys can provide some advice on a way to switch things up so my legs won't feel dead. I'm also a big 180lb sprinter, if that changes anything you'd suggest.

Saterday -- Race
25 mile road race
Sunday --Race
16 mile crit
Monday -- Long ride
35 miles of spinning in HR zone 2/3 (sometimes dipping into zone 4)
Tuesday -- Hill training (elevated front wheel on trainer) and SST work
35 min of 1min intervals, 3 min rest in HR zone 5/6 followed by 45 min SST w/no breaks
Wednesday -- Tempo day
25 mile tempo ride in HR zone 3
Thursday -- Sprint training
60 min sprint intervals in HR zone 5-6, 30 sec on@high cadence 4 min recovery in between, 20 min form sprint intervals to increase max cadence
Friday -- rest day,
20 min light spin

How's this look? On what days would you increase training volume? Also how's the layout look? Should any days be changed around? On a side note, I can't afford a powertap, so HR monitor is all I got.

Thanks a bunch for any advice ya'll can throw my way!

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caffetrieste

Jonathan Vaughters, the director of the Slipstream team, had a good, basic tip for keeping fresh. There's a video clip on CycleTo:

http://www.cycleto.com/index.php?op...r-tips&Itemid=4

daveryanwyoming

You're learning one of the basic lessons of training vs. racing. It's really hard to build training base while you're in race and recover mode. That's why the off season is so important in terms of building a deep training base(high CTL in powerspeak). Once you transition to high end interval workouts and regular racing you tend to either be tired from hard work or resting in preparation for hard work/races. That generally costs you training base and you have to start spending your hard earned CTL.

You can still build or at least maintain some base but that means either skipping some events or hard intervals or it means training right through some events and possibly sacrificing race day performance. Those are tough tradeoffs to make. Personally I'd suggest getting through your collegiate season without trying to increase your training load. Focus on the remaining events, work on weaknesses, rest appropriately but spend what base you have for your current racing season. If you get a break for a few weeks consider bumping up the volume of SST work to rebuild some base.

Once collegiates wrap up try backing off to SST for a mid season CTL rebuild before launching into the USAC season and your quest for a category III upgrade. A classic double peak season works this way. Build winter CTL, spend some of it during spring racing, rebuild after first peak and spend again during your late summer/fall peak.

If you just don't think you have the base to keep racing sucessfully at your current level then consider backing off of racing a bit and going into a base rebuild phase with some focused SST/Tempo work. Your high end might suffer a bit but you should more than make up for it with higher sustainable power and deeper base when you resume racing. Another thing to consider is that you might be able to swap some of your weekly interval work for SST/L4 work if you're racing frequently. Races should give you plenty of high end work and your time may be better spent working on sustainable power and base maintenance if you have access to a lot of racing.

There are some good examples of how training base is built and then spent during a single and multi-peak season in terms of CTL and the WKO+ Performance Manager here:
http://www.cyclingpeakssoftware.com...ancemanager.asp

Good luck,
-Dave

beison

geeze dave, you're awesome. Every post I've thrown up over the past month you've answered with a huge post that's full of really good info. Thanks for passing on the knowledge man, I really appreciate it!

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Piotr

I've spent the early part of the year building CTL close my all time high. Now as the first important races (but not the most important) are around the corner I keep my CTL basically flat, allowing my TSB to rise for a time period. I still do enough SST plus L5 not to allow my CTL to actually drop and having a high CTL allows you to deal with day to day fatigue quite well. IOW, you don't really have to sacrifice fitness to do well in your B races.

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Speedskater

Sorry for the OT: Could you explain in a few sentences, how the upgrade system works in the US and what collegiate and USAC season are?

Here in Germany, we have races from mid March to mid October. I order to upgrade, you either have to win one event ore pace top 10 five times. Only national races, where athletes from the whole country can compete, count. We have tree catgories,A, B and C, C beeing the lowest.

thekgb

speedskater,

this is the gist of it from the USA Cycling standpoint and my own take on things:

cat 5-introductory level, only need to start 10 races sanctioned by USA Cycling (USAC) and can upgrade to cat 4

cat 4-large field full of broad range of experience from lifetime cat 4 riders who haven't upgraded (or don't want to), and newbies who just came from cat 5 last week. fitness levels can vary to relatively untrained to well trained but just haven't upgraded yet.

cat 3- have scored a certain number of points on USAC scale to upgrade: see http://www.usacycling.org/news/user/story.php?id=580 Generally this field has fewer newbies as the upgrading process get's more tricky. smart and fit racers can get here quickly, maybe in just a few races/few months. You don't need to be superfit to get here but it helps. The playing field gets a bit harder as the cat 2's "in waiting" who are moving up the rank are in these fields

cat 2- see above website for how to upgrade. These racers are generally experienced, and well trained. I've know some people who got to cat 2 quickly, but it's not "common". Most people, i think, will take some time gaining race experience and building fitness to get here unless you're genetically blessed. Races get faster as you have to do primarily races with pro fields.

cat 1/Pro- see upgrade website above. Races are fast, you need to be experienced and very well trained. Most people at this level i would imagine need to give up a significant portion of their life to the bike to stay at this level of competition, although i've know a few Master's riders who retain cat 1 status, but only do small local P123 crits. Cat 1 is the highest level.

Obvisouly, a Pro event on national level (say Tour de Georgia) would be much harder than the P123 industrial park crit, so field sizes and level of competition even within the Pro races can vary.

not sure about collegiate.

-Mike

daveryanwyoming

USAC (USA Cycling) is our sanctioning body for bike races and follows UCI rules. Collegiate is racing between university teams and they have their own categories which don't directly translate. Race placings in collegiate racing don't result in upgrade points for USAC racing(unless it's changed a lot since my collegiate days) so they're basically two seperate seasons. One for school glory, one for longer term racing goals.

-Dave