Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Use It!

One of the lines I really like in "Sport Psychology for Cyclists" is that when adversity pops up, you can let it use you, or you can use it. I've been thinking about how I can use my knee problem. (By the way, my knee has been feeling very good lately.)

First, I've been spending more time visualizing mountain bike situations. Two things have surprised me so far: one, my visualized pedal stroke on the mountain bike is much more choppy than when I visualize myself riding on the road. So, I need to work to clean that up. Two, I can't immediately bring up a clear mental image of how I want to go through corners on the trail. This probably explains why I'm inconsistent (at best) in reality. So, I'm working on my cornering when I visualize now.

Second, I've been reviewing my training plan, to make sure I understand how and why I got hurt, and to make sure it's really what I should be doing. As I've posted before, I'm pretty sure I know how I got hurt and how I can avoid it in the future. The question about the appropriateness of my training plan turned out to be more interesting.

I've written many times before about how much I think my race results would improve if I were a better bike handler. I've also written more recently about how I'm not in "race shape" for enough races. I took a look at my original Morris-based training plan relative to these two objectives. Judging from my own planning, and other people's experiences with the Morris plan, I realized that I'd be spending a lot of time on the trainer doing intervals. Is this really going to help me improve my bike handling? Will this get me into race shape?

For the bike handling thing: no, my original training plan would probably not have done much to improve my bike handling. For years, I've said that this is something I need to improve, and my training plan doesn't address it! That alone is probably reason to change.

As for the race shape thing: I'm sure my original plan would improved my fitness. I'm starting to think though, especially for someone with very limited time, that the intense training needs to be more race-specific. What if, instead of doing somewhat arbitrary intervals, I focused on the specific aspects of race fitness that I wanted to improve. For example, starts are critical in MTB and CX races, so how about working on specifically improving those (on the trail, grass, etc)? Fitness would still surely improve, and the training would apply directly to racing! There's a big psychological component here too; you would know what to expect out of your body in race situations, because you would have come close to replicating those situations in training.

This is getting to be a long post already, but the gist of my proposed training plan is this: One, spend a lot of time working on fundamentals (balance, cornering, riding in groups, etc), these are likely to be longer lower intensity rides. Maybe with the addition of a little extra riding, this would be sufficient to build aerobic capacity. Two, make the more intense rides race-specific. This would include working on starts, doing intervals on technical sections of trail, etc.

I know that this plan is not ideal for developing fitness, but, it does address my training objectives... and that's really the whole point of a training plan, isn't it?

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