Winter Training

On pretty much any cycling site you can find “diaries” of professional cyclists, in which you can read about things in their world.  Some of these are well-written and interesting, but many have their last entry three seasons ago and not a morsel of worthwhile reading since.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of us avid-amateurs out there, comparing notes at every chance about how we’re training, how we’re racing, what equipment we’re buying, which routes we like to train on, and so forth.  

Put any two cyclists in a room, even if they’re absolute strangers, and gravity will pull them together into a rapt conversation that quickly drives everybody else out of the room.  This was Einstein’s second theorem, I believe.  The actual formula for it was E=M*C squared, and in plain English, what Albert meant was Enthusiasm = Mention * Cycling.  Don’t let the math throw you off.

Anyway, Fall has now ended here in the midwest, succumbing to a virtually complete dearth of sunlight, and weather-wise our daily highs barely crack 40 on a really good day, and on not-so-really-good-days-like-today the warmest point might be a toasty ten or twelve fahrenheit, with a wind-chill whose lethality is measured in minutes, not hours.  

When these conditions are upon us, it’s time to decide on a plan for the off-season.

Usually, my default is to “try” to stay in shape, to “try” to keep the weight from getting too high, and to “try” to get out on the bike whenever the temps spike up to where one could hope to preserve one’s core body temperatures for an hour or two.  

Usually, the result of all of this trying, is to gain some weight, lose some fitness, and face starting the spring racing season with form that needs improvement.

This year I vowed not to slip into the winter abyss.  This year, I set a goal to incorporate spinning, running, and weight training, to not only keep my form at end-of-season level, but actually to gain some ground before spring rolls around.  Oh yeah, and I’d drop that 10 (ahem) or so pounds I unnecessarily carried around all last year.

During the first month of our dark season, November, that is, I began augmenting my two to three times weekly stationary bike sessions with running on the treadmill on alternating days.  Becoming a bit of a runner didn’t come easily.  At first, it was just 5k at a time, trying to keep at or above a 6 mph average.  In other words, getting three miles done in a half hour was the hurdle bar, and that was without any “incline” on the machine — just puffing along with the heart beating near 170 bpm and my mind lazer-focused on the countdown timer that would let me know when I was excused for the day.  

A couple of weeks of that, and I pushed the distances up.  First to a 5 mile run, then up to 10k, or a schoach over six miles a session. Then I started pushing up the speed, with the goal of making each run quicker than the previous one.  Instead of six miles in sixty minutes, I’d toggle up the speed for as long as I could stand it, then back it down to recover, and repeat this with the goal of trimming just one or two minutes off my previous time.  

After a couple weeks, I’d actually gotten down to just over fifty minutes, and breaking that barrier became my goal.  One evening I got on and went through my usual routine, using a 7.5 mph pace as my base, and toggling myself up to 8.0 for as long as I could, then ramping it back down to recover when necessary.  

Long story short, I nailed a 49:58 pace for six miles, and decided I needed some new goals.

At the same time all this running was taking place, I continued to get on the spin bike three times a week, alternating power interval sessions with sessions of long, flat ITT-like rides.

I’m very fortunate to have a Cyclops trainer bike with a power-meter downstairs for my basement sweat-sessions.  It’s made a meaningful difference in terms of bringing up my wattage and improving my time-trialing endurance.  By pushing hard through the winter months, the goal I set in my mind was to close the performance gaps between me and some of my riding partners — a number of whom are Cat 4 riders (keeping in mind I’m a solid but unspectacular performer racing in the 5s).

The nice thing about having riding buddies, especially ones who can beat you, is that you have unlimited chances to measure just how inferior you.  If you make some improvements, you know it right away, and if you slip a bit, that’s also obvious — to everybody.

Anyway, my TT workout is mindnumbingly simple:  a) mount the bike, b) pedal 100+ rpms, c) adjust wattage (resistance) to maximum level I can sustain while keeping heartrate at 85-90% of maximum, and d) at one-hour mark, quit, have my wife say “ooh, you’re gross” as I walk by, and then go take a shower.

The interval workout, on the other hand, is equally painful, but quite different.  Over the period of an hour, I do:

- a 10-minute warmup, 

- an interval where I keep watts at 450+ for as long as possible (so far, I’m good for about 30-40 seconds at it), 

- recover (yeah, right!), for about 5 minutes

- another interval of 300+ watts for at least 3 minutes (hopefully, anyway)

- recover for about 7 minutes,

- another of those short (and I mean very short) 450+ watt thingies

- recover for a bit

- another interval of 300+ watts for at least 3 minutes (hopefully, anyway)

- recover for about 5 minutes,

- an interval targeting 275 watts for up to seven minutes (haven’t risked breaking this rule yet)

- recover and quit

The point of all of the above is to a) replicate what it’s like to ride in the area around here, and ii) build my ability to sustain higher levels of output for longer periods of time.

The quick 450-watt+ anaerobic bursts are meant just to build muscle mass and top-end power, of course.  Those 300 watt, 3-minute intervals replicate the many short, steep climbs (10-15% grade) one finds around St. Louis, while that long interval of up to 7-minutes at the end of the workout is intended to mimic some of the softer, longer climbs (~7% grade for 1-1.5 miles) we also have locally.

After 2 months of the above workout, there have been some notable benefits, and in my next diary entry I’ll describe how much this work is paying off.  Unfortunately, one thing that hadn’t changed during this time, was my weight.  I was sitting at 180-181 or so, whereas my goal is to work my way down to the 165-170 range by the start of the season.  

Undoubtedly contributing to the lack of weight loss were Good Reasons, including:

- weight lifting was adding some muscle mass to my upper body

- my leg muscles have also expanded as a result of the high-wattage intervals

And, truth be told, there were even more impactful Bad Reasons, such as:

- as I worked more, my metabolism increased and my body wanted more carbs — and more carbs I certainly gave it

- it’s cold and dark here, and it’s football season, to boot — so who doesn’t feel like having a beer or three now and then?  And how ’bout some wings with that?

So finally I tired of kidding myself about the likelihood of simply sweating down to fighting weight, and I got serious about clamping down the flow valve on my pie-hole.  What that entailed, is the following:

- Before:  One or two beers a night.  After:  One or two beers a week.

- Before:  Late night bowl of cereal in front of the TV.  After:  No solid foods after 6pm.

- Before:  Allow myself the comfort of 2-3000 calories of comfort food every time I pass through an airport (I travel a lot).  After:  Healthy, low carb meals only at meal times, no matter how many Cinna-Bon stands I walk past.

- Before:  Eat healthy foods, but don’t deprive one’s self.  After:  Take comfort in knowing that that yearning for food is simply body’s way of signaling that it’s down to running essential systems off subcutaneously-stored backup energy.    

In the first few days of this forced march past the refrigerator, the pantry, and every fast food stand in a half-dozen airports, my body seems to be responding well.  The scale says I’m down 8 pounds, to just under 174.  This kind of progress would put me safely above the yellow line on The Biggest Loser, ensuring I got to stay on the show for another week.  However, I highly doubt that the one-time benefits of becoming somewhat dehydrated and more-or-less voiding all of my gastrointestinal plumbing of any work-in-progress can be repeated on an ongoing basis.  Therefore, I expect just as much pain in coming weeks, but much slower gains as I’ll start to see some real fat-burning rather than just accounting gimmickery.

The good news, though, is that everything I’ve described above has put me in a position going into January, where instead of knowing that I’ve lost some conditioning since the outdoor season closed — I’ve made some forward progress.  

Provided I don’t fall off the program, the only thing that won’t be quite so strong going into the new season, will be as a result of the fact that I’ll have no long-rides (40-100 miles) in my legs since October.  I know I could add in some marathon trainer sessions in the basement, but that prospect’s scarier than a late night with a Stephen King novel, in my view.  Or I could man-up and layer-up and get out on the bike for some mileage, but the high temperature is hovering around 10 today, and let’s face the fact that my drive to improve just isn’t that strong.  I’ll wait until the temps warm up to the 40s and 50s, and then we’ll get in some of those 2-4 hour rides and put some of those base-miles in the training log.

In my next diary entry, I’ll describe an 8-mile winter ITT event we held last week in St. Louis, and how I fared, and how that makes me feel about the workout program I’ve maintained over the winter.  

If you’ve got your own training regimen in progress, drop a comment below and let us know what your goals are and how well your doing so far.

Caio.