On of the joys of cycling (or just about any sport) is the chance to challenge one’s limits. At least that’s my own personality & mental make-up. For good, bad or otherwise, I seem to be stuck with it. It’s not for everybody and that’s good too cause who wants everyone to be the same anyways. Some do it for fun, some for the bliss that MTB or road biking brings. Me? Well, in the words of Count Rugen from the cult classic the Princess Bride.. when you have a deep & abiding interest in pain…
Thanks to some suggestions & guidance from a fellow competitor who’s come a long way in their own personal development as a cyclist over the years, which I’ve come to admire, I went to my coach with a question about how to better change my performance & potential in racing.
I’ve gone the traditional route of interval training for close to 8yrs always working on trying to increase that gold standard of power training “the 20min threshold test”. Not familiar with it? It’s beating your brains, lungs & legs all out for 20minutes to produce the highest level of power in watts you can sustain for that period of time. Whether you’re initiated in it or not, it’s about as fun as rolling a boulder uphill. Heart rate is thru the roof & every fiber in your body is strained.
The idea is the 20minute effort is an adequate enough duration to estimate what a person can theoretically do over longer periods. In most cases that’s true… in some others, it’s not.
Over the years? I kinda got pretty good at the 20min nut buster. I could find the “pain cave” and bury myself in it. Producing results that by most standards far exceed the comparable results I’ve achieved in actual race performances. My coach repeatedly would tell me, “Aaron, really you’ve got nothing to worry about. Your 20minute numbers are nothing you have to be shy about. It’s every bit as good & better than most of the very top regional guys”. But when you have high standards for yourself & you don’t quite have the results to match. You question “what’s wrong with yourself or is your coach blowing motivational smoke up your bum”.
Interesting enough, talking to other athletes you find that the coach isn’t wrong. On one hand that feels good… on the other it stills leaves you with a WTF feeling.
Well, as soon as we think everyone is created the same & a given academic theory of training that is supposed to force certain desired physical adaptations… only it doesn’t. It’s time to go back to the drawing board.
For myself, that meant turning some conventional training wisdom on it’s head. Without a lot of boring details, it basically meant that although I had a decently developed short term power output (less than 30minutes). I’d have a greater “drop-off” in power than what is normally expected for someone once I went into longer distances of races going an 1 to 2hrs.
Seeing as you’re not gonna find a lot (or any) 20minute MTB or ‘cross races. The only option is to figure out a way to trick the body into stretching out the power output over a longer period of time & not drop off a cliff.
So begins the experiment…. and the blog title.
Going over to a full 60minute Threshold test is not necessarily a treat. Take that above described painful 20minute test and now apply for a full 60minutes… it spells O-U-C-H times three.
Needless to say, with any luck & unearthly fortitude anyone can persevere it. Getting them to sign up again?… is probably akin to asking a women to give birth a second time…. wait until the memory is distant & very faded. And somehow it’ll get done.
So tackled that 60minute effort tonite, with both good & bad results. Required some unplanned biking maneuvering to dodge a car that pulled out in front of me & some big ring shifting issues aside. Even so the first 20minutes were actually not too bad trying to find a decent sustainable pace. Approaching 40minutes, it feels like that relative ease of the first 20minutes abandons you altogether & any space you have in your heartrate to maximize your power output is no longer there & at it’s limits. The final 20minutes leaves you on guts & mental fortitude to try & find a way to hold on. I don’t know if it was my guts or mental state that gave up first but the final 5 or 6 minutes wattage was dropping like free falling skydiver.
The results were just short of what I expected, but better than anything I did previously. And though still a statistically significant drop in power from my best 20min efforts, it’s improvement. It’ll be interesting to find out how much or what kind of progress can be made between now & next spring.
The long & short of it all? We’re all made differently, our bodies have natural tendencies be it from genetics or environmental factors. One theoretical training approach doesn’t equate to the same results for everyone. If you’re looking at training, give the conventional wisdom training theories a try and certainly try them for a good long time, but if you hit up against a wall enough times and all the other markers of your potential point to being able to do even better. Consider a change in approach & find a resource that’ll help you with it. You’ll be glad you did.
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