Pre-race Warmup

With my big race coming up this weekend, I'm starting to write down my schedule for race day. One of the things I still haven't come to grips with is the best way to warm up on race day.

Lots of people say that you should warm up with some hard efforts so that when you have to do these hard efforts in a race, it isn't the first time. In principle, I can understand and agree with this. If I do multiple loops of a trail on training ride, I almost always feel better the second time around. In practice though, I've had trouble actually doing that sort of warmup.

First, I have a tendency not to have a real plan for warming up. It's usually just something vague like, "Yeah, I should warm up a little, then do some harder efforts, and then do some easy spinning." Then, on race day, I'm usually anxious and I end up short-changing the whole thing.

So, I worked out a warmup routine today (and wrote it down!), and I'm going to try to stick to it for this race. To help, I'm also going to do this warmup routine as part of all of my rides this week. This should give me a pretty good feel for how it works and if I need to tweak it at all.

So, the warm-up is:

• 15 minute easy/moderate spin
• 6 race pace intervals, 30s on, 1 minute off
• 5 minutes easy spin
• Stretch