Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Base Camp 3

In a sense, cycling is a bit like mountain climbing on the world's tallest peaks. You don't ascend to the summit of performance all at once. Instead, you progress in stages by establishing your fitness levels incrementally. Just as in climbing Everest, you start off letting your body get used to a certain level of exertion. At that level you increase the amount of training time from week to week for three weeks and then you descend back down to a lower level so that your body can recover and adapt for a week. The idea is that each time you climb back up, you can go a little higher and ask your body for a little more and it will respond.

For the next three weeks, I'm in the third of my base cycles. Base 1 was just long rides at low exertion levels. The focus was getting my body used to being back in the saddle and to encourage it to develop the needed physiology to sustain greater efforts later on. It was like doing multiplication tables: boring but necessary. Base 2 is where I added in effort. Everything was still endurance focused but I went harder and longer. I did hills and allowed myself to "stretch out" my cardiovascular system. That's exactly what it felt like too. I really had the sense that I was asking my heart and lungs to get ready to go back for some serious training. My legs still haven't been asked to do all that much "hard" work. Using my mathematical analogy; I was doing fractional math and working in decimals.

In Base 3 that will change somewhat. The biggest priority will be to finish stretching out my cardio. I'll starting doing long "tempo" rides which are focused on putting me at about 80% of my max heart rate and holding it. In addition, I'll start pushing up to my aerobic threshold for short to meduim periods of time. These will be intervals which will mean that I'll do three sets with recovery in between. The first week will be 30 minutes of tempo with about 22 minutes of intervals. By week three I'll be at an hour of tempo and 40 minutes of intervals. To this I'll add my first hill climbs. This is where my legs will get their first on the bike strength training. All climbing will be done sitting and I expect I'll have to get a little creative in my route selection. I have to find medium steep hills that are more than pop-ups and I have to find longer, more shallow hills. I've got a few ideas but we'll see. I do get to do hill intervals by the end of the period so I'm sure I'll be doing the "hill-of-death" loop before too long. Each week I'll do a tempo/interval set and a hills set. Add to that one ride that'll be done in one gear ratio only (known as single speeding). These are supposed to make me work hard on the climbs and to spin on the downhills. I'll also do some corning drills that'll help me to develop my accelerations out of the corners. The rest of the days are the same as Base 2 with more time on the bike. One of those days will be done on the MTB to keep practicing skills.

After Base 3, training gets really serious in the "Build" periods where the idea is to make your body do things harder than it's ever done before. That's where I have to decide where to focus my energy and develop my form. At least now though I'm out of the multiplication tables and into algebra and geometry. Race season starts about a month from now with the Tundra Time Trial and the Greenville Training Series and I'm on track to do solid rides in each.

The Physicist   Link Me    |