Annual Training Plan, you so smart.

The annual training plan is a beast of a document that lays out a plan for the coming racing season, be it road, mountain, cross, track, or any combination thereof. You'll have to consider things like season goals, team racing requirements, target races, long term goals, available training time, total training hours last season, total training hours required to meet your goal, and other miscellaneous factors.

If you are a road or mountain racer, you are probably beginning to thing about base miles. If you are a cross racer, you should have already put in a good amount of base work. For some excellent guidelines on how much base to put in, consult Joe Friel's book, The Cyclist Training Bible.

General guidelines for base building are that you should put in at least six, but not more than 16 weeks of base building as you prepare for your season. From there, you will likely move into VO2 workouts. If you race XC, or prefer road races to crits, you'll want to make sure to get a good amount of VO2 work in, as this will benefit you most for your racing efforts. If you are a crit monger, like myself, you'll still want to do these, but you'll likely hate them and may find yourself considering taking up cricket, where you'll never have to do another VO2 effort again. However, it will pay off, and it will lay the foundation for doing the workouts we crit racers love, sprints and anaerobic workouts. These workouts are also great for track racers that love points races, madison races, tempo races, scratch races, miss-n-outs, win-n-outs, chariot races, and really, most of the races on track, except pursuit, which will again be best served by VO2 workouts. A good sample VO2 effort would be 3-5 minutes of smashing up a gradual hill so hard you think your lungs are going to implode when you hit the end of the effort. Be careful that you set a pace that will get you there, rather than have an explosive start, then taper quickly because you went out too fast. You'll probably want to do as many of these as you can handle with about 5 minutes rest between. This is an easy to understand workout that will boost your ability to function at VO2, and if you're really lucky, it might even boost your actual VO2.

For us cross nerds, we need some VO2 work, but mostly as a good way to cap off all that base before moving on to lots and lots and lots of anaerobic work. Cross, as I mentioned in the last post, is a lot like playing mid-field in a good soccer match, tons of repeat anaerobic efforts. So, after you have your base, and you've capped it nicely with some VO2, you'll want to do anaerobic repeats. These may take the form of 30/30's, or the newly popularized 30/30/30's, or some other form of big gear, big power, short duration, repeat efforts. I prefer to do some slight variations on the 30/30/30 as prescribed by Hunter Allen. While this is an excellent training effort (30seconds hammering on the bike, 30seconds running, 30seconds soft pedal, repeat for X number of minutes), I don't feel that it's quite specific enough to cyclocross. I do a variation of that for my athletes that, to me at least, makes more sense.

And of course, regardless of what your training is, always be wary of over-training. It's funny how good results and bad results can both motivate racers to bury themselves under a huge workload.

Cyclocross, don't tell the others, but you're my favorite.

Hello fellow cyclists and athletes! I'd like to start with something fun and easy to discuss: cyclocross. Cross is my favorite way to race a bike. I love the variety it offers, the physical challenge, battling the elements, and having a great excuse to add two bikes to my collection.

The discipline of cyclocross traces its roots to Winter training rides that road racers did to stay fit. Eventually those rainy, sometimes off-road training rides got a little more organized and eventually became a racing discipline in its own right.

Today there are plenty of rules and regulations as well as official governing bodies that oversee cyclocross racing and try to keep 'cross recognizable as 'cross, without fighting progress (much).

Typical cross races are between one and two miles to each lap, and each category does as many laps as possible in a given amount of time. Beginners may race for only 30 minutes, where experts and pros race for an hour. Given that this is a relatively short duration, the intensity is typically quite high. Actually, the physiological demands of CX are often very similar to that of playing mid-field on soccer team. Lots of high power repeats with little recovery between.

Then there's the barriers. Some like to run them, some will bunny hop, others do neither. Whatever your skill level, it pays to practice both running and bunny hopping as much as possible. At many of today's races promoters are including barrier sections that are hop-able, as well as some that are not. So you  will likely need both skills.

Another key element is turning. Learning how to corner may be easier for some than for others. The primary, most effective turning technique involves weighting the outside pedal, shifting as much weight as possible onto that pedal, while leaning the bike into the turn. The technique described and demonstrated in this video are VERY similar to what you want to do on the CX bike.

I know I skipped a lot, and only skimmed what I did touch on, but if you have questions, feel free to email me, or leave them in the comments. Until next week, happy riding!

Resetting.

Today I mark the start of my online presence as a coach. Which is not to say that I disregard all previous posts, just that I'm turning this blog into one focused on fitness and my coaching programs. If you are a fellow coach or athlete, feel free to submit questions in the comments section, or email them to me. I'll do my best to respond. I'm always interested in potential partnerships, projects, and new athletes.