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.