Specific Skills and Drills for a Powerful Early Season

By Chris Carmichael
Apr 2, 2004, 10:43

As the competitive season begins, cyclists are sometimes similar to bears emerging from hibernation: disoriented, sluggish and clumsy, yet hungry. Everyone is hungry for that first taste of competition, to feel the rush that comes with pushing off the start line for the first time in a new season. By focusing on a few specific items in your training, you can start the season with more grace and success.

Add Some Speed

May times, cyclists spend the majority of the winter riding by themselves or in small groups. While this works very well to achieve the Foundation Period goals of developing the aerobic system, the average speeds for these rides are relatively low. More importantly, your power output during a solo ride is often steadier than it will ever be in competition. To succeed in races you have to have the power you developed in long steady workouts as well as the agility to change your speed rapidly, initiate attacks and respond to accelerations. In preparation for the beginning of the racing season, you need to reacquaint yourself with speed.

Fast group rides are one way to add a speed component to your training. Ideally you were participating in a few of these rides each month throughout the winter, but if you weren’t, this would be a good time to seek one out. Riding your bike inches away from other riders while rubbing handlebars and shoulders at 25+ mph is good for you. You should find that your reaction time and your tendency to exaggerate small corrections decrease as you regain your confidence in a fast-moving field.

I recommend riding early-season groups rides a little under-geared in order to avoid the temptation to sit in the draft, lazily turning over a big gear. Doing so reduces your workload; so much so that data from PowerTap and Polar power meter files show you may accomplish less overall work out of a 3-hour group ride than you did from a 2-hour solo ride. Riding group rides under geared increases the workload on your aerobic engine and helps you get accustomed to pedaling fast at high speeds. This will come in handy as you continue to gain power through the next few months of racing and training.

To further improve your comfort level at high speeds, add some downhill sprints to your training program. These sprints serve at least two purposes: developing peak power and improving your handling skills for sprinting. A powerful sprint is also beautiful to watch because when you have good technique, your body movements out of the saddle are smooth and fluid and the bike just rockets forward. Unrefined, a sprint can be messy; arms and legs flying in different directions, bike flopping side to side and going everywhere but straight ahead.

To start these downhill sprints, gather speed (25-30) as you approach the bottom of a hill, then let it rip. You want to initiate the sprint while still going downhill, but finish it after the road has leveled out. As the road levels out, you lose gravity’s contribution to your momentum and have to work harder to maintain your speed. Sprint with your head up, hands in the drops, and shoot for a “finish line” about 200 meters down the road.

Reassess You Skills

Your first seasonal dose of racing can be exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.  It takes Lance Armstrong a few races to feel settled in the peloton as well, so you shouldn’t feel like you’re the only one. To alleviate mid-pack jitters, you should spend a little time refreshing your pack and cornering skills.

I don’t want the first corner you take at full speed this year to be in your first race. Instead, you should go to a business park or parking lot after work hours and practice bombing through corners. Be sure to be careful of cars and respectful of traffic laws; reasons empty parking lots may be safer than roads. Use cones or existing curbs in the parking lot to simulate corners in races. As you practice, change how the corner is set up (90 degrees, 120 degrees, 180 degrees), your approach to it, your exit from it, etc. When you feel comfortable, exaggerate the movements to expand your comfort zone: lean the bike further than normal, cut the corner closer to the inside and farther to the outside than normal, or change your line in the middle of the corner. These are all common responses to racing situations, and you’re more likely to respond correctly if you’ve done it in practice. These cornering drill workouts don’t have to be long or involved; some athletes do them during recovery rides or on their way home from other workouts.

Don’t Get Ahead Of Yourself

The cycling season can be a long one, lasting from Feb-March to October. At the very beginning of the season, you need to incorporate speed work into your program so you can race effectively, but you shouldn’t totally reshape your training yet. One mistake people make is to abandon the workouts that develop their aerobic engines too early, replacing them with too many hard group rides, intense interval sessions, and races. It’s normal and expected that your racing performance is going to be less than optimal when the season starts if your goal events are still five months away.

For the amateur competitive cyclist, I’d recommend adding one or two speed-focused rides into your weekly training program. If you normally train five days a week (one rest day, one recovery ride, five training days), adding two shouldn’t adversely affect your overall aerobic and lactate threshold training. If you train three or four days/week, keep your primary focus on your interval workouts and add some downhill sprints or cornering drills on the way home from your rides.

Early season training should include long intervals that work on developing your power at lactate threshold and further improve the power you can produce before you reach lactate threshold.

Duration is key to these workouts, and for those athletes using a PowerTap or Polar power meter during 15-20-minute intervals, you want your power to remain relatively stable throughout each of your intervals. If you’re power is too high at the start of the interval and it falls steadily as the interval progresses, you’d get more out of the intervals if you start out a slightly lower, but more sustainable power output. Your goal is to accumulate time at this given intensity rather than achieving a higher power that you can’t sustain for very long.

One of the funny things about cyclists is that our friendships are sometimes so related to our sport that we don’t see some “friends” between the last race of one season to the first race of a new season. When you come out of hibernation and reenter the social and competitive environment of the racing peloton, arrive with grace and power and you’ll quickly become the alpha-racer.

Originally published in Cycle Sport magazine, March 2004. Chris Carmichael is Lance Armstrong’s personal coach, founder and CEO of Carmichael Training Systems (CTS), and author of The Ultimate Ride

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