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Maumee
Valley Wheelmen
The Toledo Area Bicycle Racing Club
Coach Tyson's Advice ~ III Endurance
Is endurance the ability to ride for 5 hours at 19 mph? Is
endurance the ability to follow the 43rd attack in the bike race? Is endurance
the ability to ride 8 match sprints in a day? What do you think?
I would suggest that endurance is all three.
Riding all
day at a moderate tempo I define as base endurance. Without your base endurance,
any hard work you do will over-tax you very easily. Base endurance is the type of training
everyone loves.. In fact, everyone loves it too much. At one point in time it became an
entire training regime. It used to be know as LSD. (Long Slow Distance) This is the work
that lays the base in December, January and February. Miles, miles and more miles. This
time of the year those long miles at low intensity with friends are the basis for the rest
of the year. The local hammerfest is not appropriate here. If your training partners get a
warm day and decide it is big chainring time...wave bye-bye...let them go up the road
while you continue your ride.
Having the endurance to do repeated efforts in the criterium, circuit race or
points race is developed by doing interval training. Intervals are simply putting the body
under a high load for a period of time, unloading for less-than-complete recovery, and
repeating until performance falls off more than 10%. That is an interval set. Intervals
can be done on the track, road, trainer or rollers. For most riders, interval training
should not commence before the last week or two in February. Please keep in mind that
intervals are brutally hard training if done at the proper intensity and a ridiculous
waste of time if done at a lesser intensity. Never do more than 3 interval sessions a
week, and never do more than 3 weeks in a row without a recovery week. Intervals can be
stacked up in a more intensive manner, but should only be done so under the guidance of a
trusted coach. Remember to be very careful to recover fully every 2-3 days. It is very
easy to dig yourself into a very deep hole by doing interval work.
The third type of endurance is the one almost no one but track sprinters ever work on.
It is the ability to perform at very high levels multiple times in a period of 2-4
hours. Of course its obvious why sprinters need that kind of ability, but why
the local criterium rider? Wouldnt it be nice to win two primes and the field
sprint, rather than have to decide which one to go after? You can if you will do workouts
that emphasize power and speed efforts of :30 to 1:30 with full recovery between
efforts. Most people think full recovery means they are not really training. Full recovery
means you are training the body to fully recover quicker. Full recovery means that you are
doing efforts at 100%, not the 95-98% you use for intervals. Believe it or not, that 3-5%
is the difference between getting faster or not and being able to repeat the fast efforts
throughout a race or race meet.
So, three types of endurance. You need all three, You need to train all three. You will
be a better bike racer for it.

I Leg
Speed | II The Jump | IV
Tactics
Last Updated 03/19/08
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