FORM SHARPENER,
With a hard winter of training in the bank, now’s the time to start sharpening your form. Here to get you race ready and flying on the bike is Nik Cook…
“Another hard winter of training in the bank. Now it’s time to start sharpening your form, getting race ready and hitting your first race of 2017 flying on the bike.”
If you’ve followed my bike workouts diligently through the winter, getting out for your long ride and nailing the turbo once or twice each week, then congratulations! You should’ve noticed a significant improvement in your cycling fitness, and have hopefully enjoyed the variety and progression more than just grinding out typical winter miles.
If you haven’t already done so, it’d be a good idea to schedule in a threshold test to check that your measurements, and the resulting training zones from them, are accurate. This is crucial, not only for this month’s indoor session, but for precise race pacing.
Now the weather’s starting to improve, you can ditch your heavy winter clothes and start to feel more racy. It’s also the time to start riding your race bike in race position outside. The more time you spend riding in race position, the more confident and relaxed you’ll be come race day. Buy some cheap training wheels with robust tyres if you’re worried about your race wheelset.
The duration of your outdoor ride is dropped to two hours this month, but it still contains a number of challenging efforts. For sprint- and Olympic-distance racers, this duration is plenty at this time of year and the efforts ensure you get a really worthwhile workout. Long-course racers will probably want to add some more time to this ride but the higher-intensity efforts are definitely worthwhile engine builders and should still be included.
The indoor session on the facing page is super challenging and will test the fitness you’ve developed over the winter, the accuracy of your functional threshold power (FTP) and your ability to ride consistently around this intensity. It’s an adapted version of Bill Black’s ‘Hour of Power’, but my version drops the intensity slightly to bring it in line with what you’d typically ride for a 40km Olympic-distance bike leg. Don’t think this makes it easy, though, it’s still a killer.
The aim here is to provide a main outdoor ride session for the weekend, complemented by a shorter indoor session that can be tackled several times during the week. Heart rate and power zones are given where appropriate and are based on the British Cycling Zone Calculator (http://tinyurl.com/jvxcpom).
Now the weather’s starting to improve, you can ditch your heavy winter clothes and start to feel more racy