Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Training Guidelines

"Skills pay the bills."

As I was madly planning my strength program last week, I got to thinking that, for most races anyway, my strength probably is not going to have the biggest impact on my results. (Certainly, strength work is important, but maybe not so important that it needs to be planned to the nth degree.) What was obvious to me last year was that what separates me from the top Sport racers is bike handling skills.

I've written numerous times before about how I need to improve my skills, but I've generally not gone after improving them the way I've gone after other aspects of my riding. In hindsight, I think this was a mistake.

Joe Friel wrote a couple "training guidelines" for novice mountain bike racers that I think maybe should still apply to me:

The first is "skills before fitness". I think he intended this to mean that you need to develop skills to the point where you don't crash before you worry about fitness. I'm obviously (mostly) past this point, but I think this is still a helpful guideline in terms of setting priorities. Taking the guideline literally, it means I need to do the important stuff first. So, work on skills before I go on my ride instead of after (when I might decide to skip it, or forget about it, or whatever).

The second is "speed before endurance". So, work on riding sections fast before you worry about riding the whole trail. In fact, this is basically how my very first mountain bike rides went. You ride a section, then stop (to catch your breath), then ride the next section. I've sort of dismissed this type of riding as "for beginners", but maybe it has more merit than I thought? The point for me here is work on riding technical sections at (or, ideally, above) race pace. My instinct for self-preservation is strong enough that I'm not going to ride a section significantly faster in a race than I've ridden it, or something similar, in training.

I think that following the "speed for endurance" model is also part of how I improved this year in 'cross. At our Tuesday night practices, I decided I would go as hard as I could for as long as I could. This got me used to riding sections at speeds higher than my race pace. I definitely benefited from this in the long run.

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