Cracking the Whip
When it comes to training for mountain bike racing, in the past I’ve typically used one of the two below approaches to varied success(or failure):
Hire a coach or use some other form of regimented training plan.
Ride my bike as much as possible and show up on race day.
Both approaches have their advantages as drawbacks. When I was using a coach there was no doubt that I got exponentially faster, but at what cost? I lived on the road bike, rarely able to get on the mountain bike. The workouts took priority over everything else in my life, including just having fun on the bike with friends or trying to have something resembling a social life. Alternatively, just riding my bike as much as possible often left my rides with little purpose. I’d wake up and go ride my bike, but because there was little structure I’d quit rides early or not push myself to get faster. This lead to dismal times on race day as well as not being effectively prepared for the races. So in building my training plan this time around I wanted to build in a certain amount of structure, but also leave myself some freedom for changes. The main goal was to leave enough freedom in the plan that I could ride whatever bike I wanted to that day without feeling guilty.
As I’ve laid out before, I intend to ride a mix of gravel, mountain, road, and trainer 5 days a week. Since I have a strange schedule at the moment I’ll need to get creative at times. I work Thursday evenings and am often tied up all day on Sunday. So that leaves me with one day to get a big ride in and the rest of the time for smaller rides. So my schedule looks like this:
Monday - Evening trainer ride working on a specific area of need.
Tuesday - Evening ride outside (weather dependent) on the road or mountain bike.
Wednesday - Evening base ride on trainer or at Poop Loop (weather dependent), 2+ hours.
Thursday - Rest Day.
Friday - Morning trainer ride working on a specific area of need.
Saturday - Big ride on road, mountain, or gravel depending on what bike I’d like to ride that day.
Sunday - Rest Day.
The point of any workout plan should be to focus on maximizing your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses. As I see it, mine are thus:
Strengths:
Cadence and tempo
Extended climbs
Bike handling(road and mountain)
Weaknesses:
Explosive power
Endurance on rides lasting more then 3 hours
Bike handling(gravel)
Maximizing my strengths will be fairly straight forward in that I just need to keep riding like I always do. My rides often include a fair amount of climbing and flat sections for tempo and cadence work. Building endurance for longer rides is also pretty straight forward, just ride longer. Bike handling will handle itself as I ride gravel more, so that’s not a huge concern at the moment. What about explosive power? I’m fixing my explosive power issues in two different ways; the resistance training piece will be covered next wee. For now I’ll keep my focus on building explosive power on the bike. Some of the power will return by simply riding my SS more, but I can also do this on the road bike and trainer. One of the best ways to build explosive power is to focus on sprinting. Last week I stumbled on these three workouts to build explosive power on the bike.
Power Starts
Start from a complete stop in 53x12-14(hard gear), jump out of the saddle and accelerate in that gear as rapidly as you can for 20 seconds or spun out.
Downhill High Speed Sprints
Start a 30 second sprint while about 15 seconds from the bottom of a hill and transitions to a flat or uphill. Duration is 30 seconds.
Speed Intervals
Complete a set of four 30 second accelerations separated by 30 seconds of easy spinning. Complete 4-5 sets during an endurance ride with 5 minutes of normal endurance riding between sets.
The training plan loosely laid out here allows for some structure, while also allowing for some freedom to choose what bike I want to ride on a given day. Because that’s really why we do this isn’t it? We enjoy riding out bikes and it shouldn’t always feel like to chore or obligation to ride. Stay tuned for next week when I lay out the resistance training plan.