TrisTraining: Where are we at?

Hello! Welcome to the first of hopefully many posts on my MTB racing journey as I approach the elite level riders in the coming year. One main race, the AMB "100" is done and gone (read about it here!) with a decent, but not amazing, result, one week until uni begins again (gasp!). It's beautiful (albeit a bit hot) weather, few pressures on my plate, and it's well and truly back into the racing season, so one would reasonably conclude that I'm making the most of this weekend to crank up a double century of kilometres to my odometer or something else of the like.

Not so. I'm sitting idly trying to work out what to do with my life after having my wisdom teeth out two days ago. Not feeling terrible, thankfully, but mouth is still pretty sore and the cheeks have started to swell up. I could continue to sit here and feel sorry for myself, not being able to do the two most important things in my life: cycle or eat chocolate(!), but as I am one to try to make the most of the situation, I thought I'd start trying to follow through my promise I made in my Elite MTB "campaign" to share as much as I could on my training strategies - just to sound professional, let's refer to it as TrisTraining. Hopefully you enjoy reading it, and maybe even learn something from it - wouldn't that be something!

If you want to read a expert writing the same thing, read Joe Friel's Mountain Biker's Training Bible, which is much of the basis for my own planning.

1) CHOOSING COMPETITIONS

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the first thing that one needs to do is work out what races they're actually going to do. Luckily, in the MTB world, there are plenty to choose from - short club races, Olympic XC, marathon distance, and anywhere up to a 24 hour. It depends on what suits your schedule, what you're good at and what you enjoy.

I've personally come to focus on the XCM (marathon) races - you know, Convict 100, Capital Punishment, Fling - which are around 100km in distance. This is most likely a result of having good bike handling skills and good endurance, but not being particularly amazing at either (yet!). In contrast to the XCO races, these are generally a big loop and involve a mix of terrain that includes singletrack, firetrail, even some road and anything in between, and often some steep climbs. Due to the distance and nature of an XCM, it could be seen two ways - either as a "race" or a "challenge" (for those who want the satisfaction of completing such an mammoth event which is an achievement in itself) - whereas an XCO would almost always be seen as a race alone as the distance is much less spectacular. And of course there are also multi-lap races like 4h, 6h, 12h and mammoth 24h that are relay-style and can enter in teams or solo depending on how much you want to hurt yourself. The latter of these is the only one that's really recognized as something that's worth competing heavily in, the rest are only in place for the "fun" aspect.

You can plan out your races for the whole year, or for the coming months. Due to having a work placement later this year and am unsure of my whereabouts for that, I've just made a basic plan for the first half of the year, where I've chosen the races I want to do, as well as their importance to me. An "A" race for me would be the one or two focuses of the season, and in this case is the Convict 100, the first post-school race which I completed in 2012. Due to my familiarity of the Great North Road, and my intent on doing more recon rides of the course, I expect that the reversal of the course will be advantageous to me and want to make the most of it.

The "B" races would be a couple of other races that I'd do which I'd make sure I was well prepared for, but wouldn't take quite as seriously as the former, in this case the (already completed) AMB "100" and Capital Punishment, as well as the Willo. The "C" races are any other races that I'd do, in which I don't really care about the results, but do to get additional racing experience - pacing, sprinting, quick decision making and the like which you just don't get on a training ride. For me, this consists of the Western Sydney Club events, as well as the OMV short XC series which hopefully will get underway this month after the first was rained out. The short XC consists of something like going around a ~600m course as many times as you can in 15 minutes and anyone who hasn't been lapped does another 3 laps and first over wins - it's a real bargain, you get all the pain you'd get in a marathon compressed into 15 minutes!

2) PLANNING TRAINING BLOCKS

So, we've got our races chosen and prioritized. How do we prepare for them? Well, several years ago, I thought it basically consisted smashing myself as much as I could in the lead up with big rides with a lot of going flat out whenever I had time, and then riding the next day when I was destroyed was a good thing. Not quite, for I failed to factor in one cruicial factor: recovery. From my skeleton knowledge of the human body, it is the recovery period in which one's body will repair the muscle that is torn apart in the intense activity that we do when we train, which is the only way it can become stronger for the next bout of efforts. I've found it helpful to view a period of around a month as a "block," which will involve several weeks of hard work, followed by about a week of recovery.

The way my races happen to be scheduled this half of the year conveniently means that I when I started training after a bunch of "fun" riding in the Snowies, I had exactly 16 weeks before Convict, with the AMB at the end of the fourth week and Punishment at the end of the eighth. So obviously enough, I chose to have 3 solid weeks of training, followed by a taper/recovery week in the fourth. The aim is to gradually build the magnitude and intensity of these three week sessions as Convict gets closer, which is something that I should be able to do, if the recovery weeks do their job.

Of course, nothing will ever go completely to plan, and the first necessary variation came when I discovered that my wisdom teeth would be coming out in a scheduled training week, after which I'd need at least 4 days of minimal activity - it happens. So I trained halfway into the previous week, making this a recovery week (on all fronts). Still not sure when I'll be up to riding again, but hopefully won't be too long (as I'm getting restless!). Illness, family, study, work, injury can all muck up our plans when we least expect it, and I imagine it will happen more. As important as it is to make plans, the real test is how we adapt to variation of them. (As Vince Lombardi said, "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you THINK about what happens to you." Something we all need to heed...)

3) PLANNING A TRAINING WEEK

Now that I've sorted out the "macro-training" period, it's time to look at the "micro-training" period - the week by week training strategy. Human beings are creatures of habit, and although it makes no difference whether we have a repeated cycle every 4 days, or 8 days or no particular structure to it at all so long as all skills are practiced and recovery is carried out, most will find it a lot easier to have a weekly routine that will tie in with all their other weekly commitments. Which is what I do for the weeks in which I am training in.

So, HOW do we train in a training week? The best way I have found to approach it is to think about the A-priority race I'm preparing for and think about what it has: How many hills, what proportion of singletrack, how long is it, is it technical, etc etc. And then I'll think about ways in the different days of the week that I can focus on one of these aspects.

Distance: Even at my level of fitness, simply completing 100km on dirt is a big ask on my body, regardless of how quickly I do it, so first and foremost, I need to practice distance rides on the dirt. Most Saturdays, Jonathan (jp) and I have met for loop ride incorporating 4 of the best MTB tracks in Hornsby involving all one would find in a race - hills, flats, different descriptions of ST, and of course endurance. This usually amounts to around 70km depending on how many loops we do of the STs, and although is not done at a hard pace (for me!), it gets my body used to doing big distances.

Climbs: A race such as Convict has 2 major climbs; Jack's Track is very steep and sketchy, where the Shepherd's Gully ascent is more gradual, though a similar elevation. The obvious way to prepare for them is a LOT of hill training. Initally, I was doing this via a series of hill repeats on local steep climbs, but the boredom of this painful activity got the better of me, and having realized that by doing an out and back of the Quarry Road Track involves two major 150vm ascents, I have resorted instead to do a weekly ride on it where I aim to push myself to my limits, either on the whole thing or just on a single climb. As painful as this track is, living near it has been my biggest gift for I expect it has played the most notable part in getting me fit over the past 6 years. Basically, however you do them, you NEED to train for climbs and they should hurt!

Singletrack: The Convict course does not have any conventional singletrack, but Punishment and the Willo do and the GNR section certainly involves a lot of technique, so practicing bike handling is crucial to any MTB race that deserves to be called an MTB race. One of the problems in my training half a year ago was that although I was riding at places such as OMV reguarly, and being reasonably competent on it, I've never been really fast on it, something that is necessary in a race setting. This is when Strava becomes my friend. I've found certain segments - from 300m to 1km, and try to PR (or sometimes sneak a KOM) them. The prospect of having my name on the leaderboard has definitely helped me improve my skills. But if you want to avoid a Strava addiction (quite sensible, really - it's almost as dangerous as smoking!), a stopwatch works equally well, which is something I utilized for many years!

Cadence & Tempo: Due to being fortunate enough to free gym membership at uni last year, and being stuck there for long days, I spent a fair amount of time turning into a sponge on the spin bikes there. There are many types of drills that one can do there, but I devised 3 different ones which I did each week to practice keeping a good cadence as my fatigue builds up. The first routine consisted of spinning at 90-100rpm for 10 minutes three times, with a 5 minute break in between. The next was the same thing, except with more resistance and only for 3 minutes. The final was sprint training, for which it'd be 30-60s full pelt with equal time to rest. These routines hurt, so self-motivation is essential here, but if you can do that, it'll make riding in the bush on a real bike with others easy in comparison.

Descents: From the number of times I've been dropped or almost dropped on downhills, one would think I'd learn to practice them. But I haven't until now. Although in terms of time, the downs can only make seconds difference, as opposed to the ups which can be minutes, the speed you're going means that others can get away just as easily. So in the coming weeks, I'm going to spend more time thinking about lines for descents, particularly the steep/rocky ones, which are a particular weakness of mine. Hopefully that'll work.

Race skills: A race is more than just riding 100km. If you want to win or place, you have to know when to go hard, when to save your energy and where to position yourself. That, as I have learned, cannot be done by training alone. You have to do races to practice it! So as stated before, that's where C priority races come into play.

Strength: There are mixed opinions that I've read on strength sessions. In the early part, I found that a bit of plank, and arm and leg resistance training was helpful to my overall physique, but was something I would personally focus less and less on when I'm in the racing phase.

To sum up: a typical week of training involved the following:

Monday: Rest (Easy ride/walk)
Tuesday: Some weights and core strength in gym + aforementioned spin bike routine 1
Wednesday: Quarry Road Track (very steep firetrail) at a hard pace, about 30km total. Spin bike routine 2 in the afternoon
Thursday: Singletrack training at OMV (as explained above) + Spin bike routine 3 later on + weights
Friday: 40km road ride, involving 2 200vm climbs, at hard pace
Saturday: Aforementioned 70km MTB loop, moderate pace
Sunday: 72km road ride, including 3 200vm climbs

Hopefully I'll continue to tweak this structure this year and improve it more, but I could definitely feel the difference once I started following it.

4) PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

You can get zillions of things to "measure" performance - HRMs, power meters, cadence sensors, etc etc. They help some, but they distract others. In the end of the day, your performance is how you do in a race. But getting a feel for your progress is important if I don't get obsessive about it. Again, my best measurement for my performance is Strava. By attempting PRs on certain segments for weekly rides when all other conditions are the same (roughly), it's definitely shown me how much I'm improving sufficiently. The power sensor on the gym bike is also useful (though who knows how reliable it is), seeing what level of power I'm outputting in 1/3/10 minute intervals can be a good guide.

5) THE DARK SIDE?

Most of the top MTBers have and do a lot of training on their road bikes. I personally have a 4 year old Felt F85 which I got for $900, and in terms of time, would generally split my training quite evenly between the two. Some good riders don't, and they get by, but I personally find road riding beneficial to improve things such as pacing, cadence and fitness, something which obviously translates to MTB races of any description. If you can't justify the cost of a road bike, remember that albeit going slower, doing a big road ride on your MTB will have the same effect on your training, if not better as you're actually practicing on your race bike. I do most of my rides alone (as a result of a number of factors) but am considering about my options of group road rides, for if you are in a fast group, it can help racing skills of placement, holding wheels and attacking, but if the group is too slow it really won't do much for your fitness. Personally, I recommend having some form of road bike in your home but in the end, it's up to you.

And at the end of the day, it's all up to you. If you've got the most mathematical, methodical training plan that involves 50 hill repeats per week, sessions on the trainer for hours on end and won't let any sugar into your system, but hate it, it's not sustainable. Make your training fun so that you'll be motivated to do it. Do it in a way you enjoy. Because unlike your job, you're not doing it as a favour for anyone. Well MOST of you aren't...

Hope you find this helpful or at least not a complete waste of time! This definitely isn't expert advice, but it's worked for me so hopefully will work for you follow it. Please comment on what you think of it, as it'll give me an idea of what else to write in future posts, when I find out just how idiotic my ideas are!