Now I’ve let you into a little bit about my plans for next year (which may have evolved slightly with regard to my early-season A-race) I suppose I should let you know how I plan from getting where I am today, having not run for most of 2018 and training very little in general since April, to what I hope will be a strong showing in mid-March.
When I first bought my road bike at the end of Aug 2016 it was the first time I’d ridden a bike in about 10 years (the last bike being a hardtail MTB as a kid), this meant that confidence in my ability to handle a road bike was low (particularly on narrow country lanes being passed by fairly large cars moving at speed in fairly poor weather conditions). Had I been left to my own devices, sooner or later I probably would have gone out for a ride and had an encounter that either left me so shaken-up or injured that I’d have hung my bike up for good; luckily for me I had to attend a three-week work event in October to which I couldn’t take my bike and it was here that a colleague introduced me to a Wattbike for the first time.
For the first couple of weeks I just jumped on and rode, quickly getting bored (looking back at my training log I managed one 43min session with the rest being 15-20min each) I soon realised this wasn’t going to get my anywhere and so I started searching my phone’s App Store for anything that could tell me how I should be making this most of this new-found resource, enter the Wattbike Hub. After another week or so of using the Wattbike ‘Grand Tour’ workouts I started to feel much more comfortable on the bike and realised that, as with running, training is not about going as hard as possible until your legs, lungs or heart force you to stop but should be structured to allow you to make targeted improvements to your fitness over a specified timeframe.
I spent the rest of the 2016 winter heading down to my local gym to jump on a Wattbike, only braving rides outdoors when the weather was exceptional and even then, I stuck to roads I knew well (I would only ride roads if: I knew they were likely to be quiet, were wide enough for any traffic I did encounter to pass easily and they had a decent surface). I made exceptions to this rule twice and both occasions turned out fairly poorly, with hindsight I made some fairly stupid decisions ahead of them which set me up for failure but we’ll get to those in another post.
It is testament to the benefits of indoor training that a winter of intermittent (but focused) Wattbike training, with a couple of roller sessions added in January, got my bike fitness to a point that come February I was able to join a local group ride for my first outdoor ride of the year and covered 85km of group-riding in a little over three hours. I made more mistakes here, the biggest being that when the ride-leader told me we’d “go out for about 50” I thought it would be fairly easy, after all I’d soloed 35km (my longest ride at the time) in worse conditions a couple of months prior and I had many more indoor ‘miles’ in my legs by now. It was as my Garmin ticked over 50km and showed nearly 2 hours ride-time that I looked around, realised I had no idea where we were (certainly nowhere near home) and asked another rider if we were nearly back; it was then that I learnt the “50” we were going out for were miles, not kilometres. Having skipped breakfast, with two of my three gels already used and no money for the cafe stop (which I also didn’t know about until this point) I settled myself in for a long, cold and hard ride home. Luckily for me one of the other riders was gracious enough to buy me coffee and when we left the cafe the group split leaving only myself and the ride leader to head back to the starting point, which he was happy to do at my (slow) pace. The positive from this escapade? Not once did I get concerned with my bike handling, even riding at speed, on someone’s wheel, mid-pack, passing cars along narrow roads. Don’t get me wrong, my handling skills hadn’t improved but my bike fitness was now at a point that I could focus on handling rather than keeping my legs moving, lungs working and heart beating.
By now I was convinced of the benefits of indoor cycle training so looked around for something that I could use in earnest, soon I found TrainerRoad and haven’t looked back since. Whilst I’ve neglected it so far this year, from Monday I’ll be picking up again with their Sweet Spot Base training plan (I’m hoping to do a slightly modified version of the mid-volume schedule, aiming to complete 4 of the 5 weekly workouts) added to my own running base plan. All told, assuming no injuries and life / work doesn’t get in the way too much, come December I should have completed 12 weeks of Sweet Spot Base on the bike and be comfortably running 10km in 50min – from a starting point of it being a struggle to finish 3km when I last ran in June. I’ll also be trying to put in 2 strength and conditioning sessions (each about 20-30min of bodyweight exercises) and 2-3 sessions of proprioception and mobility work, all aiming at reducing the risk of injury and improving my ability to hold my aero position when I breakout the TT-bike.
That’s it, you all know the start of my plan to build my fitness back to (hopefully) better than it was this time last year, albeit in two rather than three sports, with the aim of an early-season Duathlon. As I get to the end of my base phase (towards the end of November) I’ll update you on how I’m going to structure my run training for the Build phase (TrainerRoad will be taking care of the bike, likely with their eight-week Sustained Power Build plan).
I’ll close out with my three key takeaways from that first group ride so any new riders out there can learn from my mistakes without having to make them yourself:
1. Always check what system a new group uses to measure their rides; getting it wrong can be costly both in terms of the amount of time you’d allocated to the session but could also potentially put your training back if you overreach too far.
2. Take food, take more food than you think you’ll need. Since that first ride I don’t go anywhere without at least two gels and a small bar (a week ago I rode to a friend’s BBQ which took about 12min and I still took a couple of gels). Unless you’re racing and able to get more fuel in a feed-zone, you’re better to carry slightly too much rather than too little, even if you don’t need it you may be able to help someone else out of a hole.
3. Carry cash. It doesn’t matter whether you plan to stop mid-ride or no, always have a note tucked away with your phone or ID. You never know when you may suffer a mechanical that you can’t deal with road-side and need to call for assistance or, when you ignore tip 2, if you’ve got some emergency cash stashed away you can stop at a shop / petrol station for some chocolate to get you home.
That’s all I have for now. Base season starts tomorrow with a short, very easy, run and an FTP Test – I’ll try to update you mid-week on how tings are progressing. In the meantime, let me know what mistakes you made on your first group ride and leave any tips you’d give new riders in the comments – lets help each other out!
West Country Triathlete 