I would like to thank Bob Brooks for composing tonights team/club entry: Please feel free to email Bob at altrdstats51@yahoo.com
Who is Bob Brooks?: He is currently acting as my cycling coach
Profile:
mtb racing 1990-1996
Road Racing since 1994
Coaching since 1995
Personal Training since 1997
Spinning instructor since 1999
Current USA Cycling Level 3 (Club) Coach
Road: Category 2
Track: Category 3
A smattering of wins through the years. Larger
successes have been in season long points
competitions.
4th overall Indiana Race Series Masters 35+ in 1997
3rd overall IRS Masters 35+ in 2000
2nd overall IRS Masters 35+ in 2004
1st overall IRS Masters 35+ in 2005
Currently work as an environmental consultant by day
and a fitness consultant by early morning and evening.
Also occasionally take on freelance writing
assignments.
JT was instrumental in my becoming a racing cyclist.
for it was he who first showed the way toward
organized training and overcoming suffer-induced self
doubts. JT and his father, Walter T, are two of my
very best friends. Thanks guys.
Cumberland Cycling Crew- An Address From Bob Brooks:
JT asked me to write some training tips for your blog. Thanks JT and thank you all for reading this and subsequent entries. I am honored to share training tips with such an enthusiastic group. If this weather ever breaks, I plan to come down your way for a weekend of riding. Your area is one of my favorite areas in the entire country. You are blessed with fine terrain and low traffic. I'll remind you to appreciate those great cycling benefits.
While coaching other cyclists, by far the most questions I receive from athletes revolve around how to train in the fall and winter; the 'off' season. In today's world of cycling however, there really is no 'off' season. While it is good to take a week or two away from structured training after a long season of racing, experts such as Chris Carmichael advocate getting right back to your training routine no later than November 1. With career, family, church, volunteer and other responsibilities tugging at our time, we simply don't have the luxury of taking extended periods of time away from training. In middle age, maintaining and building on the fitness you have is much easier than letting it all go, only to re-establish the same fitness level by the time the following season ends. In that scenario, you never get any better. So this first entry will offer suggestions on how to get better from season to season.
Many struggle with what to focus on during the winter months and end up training with no focus and no end goal in sight. It's been sort of a haphazard, go-with-the-flow type of
approach to merely get through the winter. Here's my take. Winter is the time to make improvements (gains) for the coming year.
For most of us, time is such a constraint that we do the group rides or track (velodrome) training through the meat of the season and then race on weekends. And let's face it, we all have egos the size of Texas, so none of us are gonna push hard enough on the group rides to blow up and get dropped. Blowing up and getting dropped means riding beyond our limits, which in turn, pushes us to new levels of fitness. So with our egos
anchoring us to the pack, specific training for improvement is very limited during the race season. I hope this makes sense to everyone. In this scenario, it is critical to take advantage of the winter months, to not only maintain, but to improve your strength and power, your fitness level on the bike. Now is the time you make gains.
Many coaches, including Eddie Monnier at http://www.velo-fit.com, Rick Stearn at http://www.cyclecoach.com, among so many others, suggest that while VO2 Max is largely genetic, bike racers can improve the most important indicator of success, that being power output at lactate threshold. Monnier states, "Lactate threshold is an important indicator of endurance cycling performance. Put simply, the bigger your engine, the less taxed you will be at a given effort and the more you will have left when it comes to crunch time in the race."
You can build a bigger engine by doing lactate threshold intervals twice a week. It's a simple protocol. You don't even have to be on the trainer for more than 60 minutes. You warm up for 15 minutes, then ride in your zone 4-5a for 30 minutes, and finally, cool down for 15 minutes. If you are just starting out, you may want to break up the interval into 2X15-min. with 3-min. recovery between each interval. For those uncertain of their zone 4-5a, email me at altrdstats51@yahoo.com and I'll help you establish your training zones. I'm an email away.
Now, this post is getting long, but one other topic needs discussion. The workout above may seem a little intense. The old myth of doing too much intensity during winter still clings to many amateur racers. Guys and gals, we don't race enough to suffer burnout. We don't race 180 days a year, or whatever it is the pros do. And we don't ride 6 hours every day. Furthermore, from LeMond in his 1986 book to Carmichael today, every coach advocates maintaining some intensity through the winter. With the limited amount of time we have available, we have to capitalize on it with quality, not quantity. Improve speed, build a bigger engine; don't be afraid to push yourself now. On that note, I'll close with a favorite quote:
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (on his trainer); whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood (think Paris-Roubaix); who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who does actually try to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion and spends himself in a worthy cause (winter improvement); who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits (anchored to the pack on training rides) who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither
victory nor defeat.
Some favorite quotes:
"Rope. The gods have a great sense of humor don't
they? If you lack the iron and fizz to take control of
your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to
the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by
having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail
to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what
inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull
and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice
their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic
dreamers will end up in the rope yard.....
"The price of self destiny is never cheap, and in
certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve
the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that
must be thought." --- Tom Robbins, "Jitterbug
Perfume."
"Men have looked away from themselves and at things so
long that they have come to esteem the religious,
learned and civil institutions as guards of property,
and deprecate assaults on these, becasue they feel
them to be assaults on property. They measure their
esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what
each is." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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