WE RIDE WITH STEPHEN ROCHE
Thirty years ago he won the Giro, Tour and Worlds, so the Irishman knows about targeting several goals
BE HONEST 1
Don’t overestimate what you’ve done, or underestimate the goals. With jobs and family commitments there is only so much training we can do. Anyone looking to target more than one goal in a year should first think, okay, what have I done and is it enough? Set the goals, but if you haven’t put in the training don’t try to go for the performance. Do the ride for fun, as training for the next goal.
START EARLY 2
All my goals in 1987 were approached differently, although every year I used the first part of the year to build up the distance and the fitness for the new season, so December, January, February, even March, were about getting the miles in and building up the intensity.
LET IT GO 3
Give yourself some down time or you’ll crack. You might be coming from a hard event and needing to recover before the next one, or it could be work commitments you need to recover from. After the Giro there were three weeks until the Tour, so if I went out and hammered myself I would keep the form at first, but would it last three weeks into the Tour? So I let the form go, initially, and used the time to recover mentally. There were six weeks between the Tour and the Worlds, so I went on holiday for two weeks.
BUT NOT TOO MUCH 4
The problem was I didn’t want to go to the Tour and finish 21st in the prologue and have people writing me off. To be able to announce myself at the Tour I had to change my programme for the final week and work on speed. I finished third, which is what I wanted to achieve.
PICK YOUR MOMENTS 5
If you’re entering a sportive or event, ask yourself what you want to do, and then work out where on the course you’re going to need to be good to achieve that goal. At a oneday event you might get away with riding hard all day, but anything longer than that and you’re definitely going to have to pick the stages that suit you. Physically you can’t ride at 100 per cent every day, but mentally you always need to be switched on.
BE YOURSELF 6
Try different things and find out what suits you. And don’t go out using heart rate or power and comparing yourself to other people’s numbers, everyone is totally different and those numbers only work once you’ve done the tests and learned your limits.