Thoughts
Over the last month I have allowed my personal cycling life take second stage to numerous other items. Honestly, I am not happy about this at all. After numerous texts, Facebook messages and other social media inquiries, I am planning my Comeback. This Blog will be the first step. I am using it as a means of social intimidation basically making myself accountable to you, the readers.
Each Sunday I am going to post what
my next week’s workouts are and how I did last week. The biggest problem
with self-coached athletes is that they (we in my case) are not held
accountable to anyone but ourselves. This is a recipe for failure.
I can write some of the best plans to get athletes anywhere
they want to go in our discipline, I have a fantastic one sitting in
my inbox, but without execution, it simply is a plan, nothing more.
Looking at the race schedule I have
identified two races that I want to be prepared for, the McDonald's Criterium
in my hometown of Huntington WV, and Tour of Washington County in Hagerstown
MD. Both races are pretty close calendar wise, but it’s not like I have
taken months off, just slacking since Jeff Cup.
Strategy
The first race is the McDonalds Crit
in Huntington WV. This is a very simple crit, with four turns in a downtown
area, fairly fast.
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Building a plan for Criteriums
As seen in the chart above, fitness
for criteriums is very focused. The unfortunate part of the
chart above is where the power numbers lay. Zone 1, active recovery, well
do not need to train for that part. Zone 6, anaerobic capacity, well that
means suffering and a lot of it.
This means that the workouts over
the next month will be focused in on VO2Max efforts,
shorter lactic acid, and sprints.
The VO2Max Efforts will be between 3
and 5 minutes, while the higher Anaerobic Capacity efforts will be closer to
one minute.
For the VO2Max, I will employ a
combination or 3 to 5 minute efforts, with equal amounts of rest between.
As my fitness increases I will slowly decrease the rest intervals and
increase the intensity of the rest intervals. These efforts will be high
on the normal suffer scale but mid-range on the Sufferlandian scale.
Now
the AC effort are a completely different beast. This is where the
suffering will max out. The Anaerobic Capacity workouts will call upon my
anaerobic glycolysis system. This is the one that mainly used for 30
seconds to 2 minutes. This 121 to 150% of your LT (Allen and Coggan 2010).
This means lots of 1 x 1 min intervals, when
I say lots, I am talking 60 per week lots. The method of 1 x 1 that works the best for me is Sufferfest Revolver and Sufferfest A Very Dark Place on the CompuTrainer, no cheating there. This will not be easy, but
will be necessary for success. I will
have to watch my ATL to ensure that it does not climb more than 7 TSS per week,
to ensure that I am not over reaching (Coggan 2013) .
The
last area that I will focus in on are my sprinting efforts. This will help develop the Creatine Phosphate
system. This system is used for those
all out 5-15 second sprint effort. I
will have to do a ton of these around Hains Point to build muscle and the
coordination to execute. This will not
be nearly as painful as the AC efforts but will require absolute all out
efforts.
So
that is the basic plan. I will post each
ride on Strava and TrainingPeaks for your amusement. Time for three solid weeks of pain,
Sufferlandrian style.
Works Cited
Allen, Hunter, and Andrew Coggan. Training and
Racing with a Power Meter. Boulder: Velopress, 2010.
Coggan, Andrew R. The scientific inspiration for
the Performance Manager. 5 4, 2013. http://www.peaksware.com/articles/cycling/the-science-of-the-performance-manager.aspx.
