Athlete Blogs
April 14th, 2009Another one of those posts...
Yes, I'm sure you are tired of hearing the same old posts from me, work hard, blah blah and you will do you best. So if you are go ahead and move on.But there isn't any magical formula to winning races, to riding your best, putting the hurt to your weekend group ride buddies. It's one of those things that is so simple people look for much more complex things, tricks, one legged low cadence drills, etc. Things should be simple. Take weight loss. It's so simple, yet almost no one gets it. Eat less. Period. There is no need to get caught up in glycemic load this, % of that, it's all noise. Just eat less. Easier said than done for sure.
Riding well is the same. Ride hard, recover and repeat. No in between. No "try", no "I'm tired so I'll just go medium".
I was pondering this at minute 7 of my second 20 min interval today and like usual I found motivation in the fact that most guys would rather do a "hard" 2 or 3 hr ride then really ride hard for 20 minutes. Maybe you get the same benefit, maybe it works for one guy and not another. Some guys who are immensely talented could ride a tricycle around the parking lot and still be fit and kick butts. This is one reason to take what one strong rider does with a huge grain of salt. Just because the local hammer, pro, whomever does "X" does not mean you should do that. It could be quite the opposite.
For me - I'm sticking with the either HARD or EASY plan. No in between, at least not much of it.
I will add the following warning - please don't think all the guys I coach live a 4AM interval only training plan. They don't. If I blindly applied training principals to everyone in the same way, I'd probably have 1 client. I have guys ranging from those who want to win time trials only, all around guys and guys who really only care about beating up on their buddies on long hilly rides and centuries. The training plans are as different as the goals.
Which brings me back to my own plan this year - which is really to bring focus to performing my best at the events I care about most, my A races. Crits and short TTs. I may do 10% of my races that are road races, but they are not important to me, I won't be my best in them, but I'll do my very very best in 10 mile TTs, nats TT, crits. Events 75 min or less. Crazy? I think not. Go to a track meet, talk to a 100m runner about doing the 400. We're talking 8 seconds vs 45 seconds. No way in hell a 100m guy would even think about doing the 400. 1600 or 5K? Not a frickin chance. Keep that in mind when you plan your trianng and goals. You can't be great at everything.
Oh - one other thing - Will, very impressive TT last weekend. We need to find an event we can both do - a clash of the TT titans if you will. It would be fun to do battle, nerve racking and likely extremely painful.
Time to go glue (yet another) tubular.
