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2017: make it your best year on a bike!

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November 1st is the traditional time for cyclists to begin thinking about the next season. Now is the moment to set goals, to sketch out a new training plan, to settle key dates in your calendar and to begin serious training for 2017.

Goals

Let’s begin with the goals. I’m going to assume that your main goal for the season is the Haute Route Alps, which will begin on August 21st 2017 on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. I’ll also assume that you have a secondary goal, the Marmotte on July 1st.

We should now make these goals a lot more specific. Depending on your history and experience as a cyclist, they could range from as simple as “finish inside the cut-off time” to as detailed as “climb the cols du Glandon, Télégraphe and Galibier at an average power of 265W and have enough in reserve to climb Alpe d’Huez at 275W”. You can also set a goal in terms of place (i.e. finish in the top 50). However, success in this type of goal depends as much on who else shows up on the day as it does on your own exertion.

The Haute Route is an endurance event and therefore performance is very largely determined by your ability to make repeated climbs at a good pace. A good measure of this is your FTP/kg (Functional Threshold Power, or the highest average power you can maintain for 60 minutes, per kg of bodyweight).

Our experience at the Haute Route tells us that you need to be able to generate a minimum of 3W/kg at FTP in order to be able to finish the Haute Route within the cut-off times, and a minimum of 4.5 W/kg at FTP to hope to finish in the Top 100. Read our post here for more on this, including how to evaluate your FTP/kg if you don’t have a power meter.

Other factors are important, such as descending skills, group riding skills, nutrition, hydration and recovery, however if we could establish a list of every rider’s FTP/kg at the start of the Haute Route it would be pretty close to the general classification at the end.

The biggest pay-off in performance terms is to increase your FTP/kg.

Training Plan

Here is a macro view of the annual training plan to prepare the Haute Route:

In order to convert this into something usable on a daily basis, you need to begin by getting hold of a calendar covering the entire period from now to the end of August. Block off all the dates that are already fixed:

  • The Haute Route
  • The Marmotte (secondary objective)
  • Other events (secondary or tertiary objectives)
  • Family holiday commitments
  • Business trips

Work back from August 21st, the start of the Haute Route Alps. The week before, Aug 14-20, should be marked Taper. Mark the major periods of your training program as 4-week blocks: Pre-Competition, Build, and Base. Each of these 4-week periods constitutes a cycle of training within which you will progressively build to a peak in the third week, recover in the 4th week and evaluate your progress via a test on the final day.

This will give you something like this (download link below):

You should adjust the plan as required to take into account unavoidable constraints such as family holidays or business trips during which you will not be able to train: these should fall in Recovery weeks.

If you are over 50 or recover slowly, it may be better to work in blocks of three weeks rather than four. For more on this, see “Fast after 50” by Joe Friel.

You can download this calendar in Word and modify it yourself. Here is the three-week version for the over-50s.

Reverse periodisation

Now that you have the basic building blocks set out, you need to fill them with detailed activities. The basic principle is that the closer you get to the event, the more your training should resemble the event itself. In the case of the Haute Route, this means doing more and more long rides including more and more climbing from April through to August.

This is the perfect situation in which to follow a so-called “Reverse periodisation” programme, where, contrary to traditional periodisation, you train at high-intensity/low-volume through the winter months and add volume through the spring and summer.

The objective is to develop fundamental qualities such as leg strength and velocity (high cadence), increase VO2max and improve core strength and core flexibility during the winter and early spring. These qualities must then be maintained through the spring and summer while adding endurance and especially endurance in Zone 3, (just below the lactate threshold) which is the zone at which you will do most of the climbs on the Haute Route.

Read more about which activities to do during each period:

Overview

Base period

Build period

Pre-competition period

Training load

How do you measure your training load, and how do you know that you are doing enough?

Traditionally, training load was measured in time or in distance: so many hours per week or so many kilometres per month. This is however unsatisfactory because it doesn’t take into account the intensity of your training.

If you ride with a power meter you have access to a much better measure: the TSS or Training Stress Score. This is a number calculated during each ride that takes into account how hard the ride was and more specifically the time spent in each zone. Time riding in high intensity zones (3, 4, 5) counts much more than time spent bumbling along in Zone 1. The TSS score is thus a much better measure of your training load.

Because the TSS calculation is based on your FTP, it is normalised and can be used as a benchmark.

Here are a few examples of typical TSS scores:

 

ACTIVITY TSS
One hour FTP test (= one hour time trial) 100
Typical Haute Route stage (one day) 250-400
The Marmotte (one day) 450-550
Haute Route (seven days) 1700-2400

 

So how do you know you are doing enough?

The answer to this depends on your goals. There are two main measures to look at: your weekly TSS score and your FTP/kg.

If your goal is just to finish within the cut-off, make sure you will be at or above 3W/kg by August and build your training volume to the point where you do at least one week in June or July with a TSS score in excess of 1400. To relate this back to real-world numbers, it means riding 500-600km and climbing 14,000 – 15,000m in the week, or 70% of the Haute Route.

If your goal is to finish in the Top 100, and to do this you need to increase your FTP/kg by 0.3 W/kg, you can easily measure your progress during the test at the end of each training block. If you are making steady progress, all well and good. If not, it is important to evaluate the reasons: is your training insufficient, or inappropriate? Are you doing too little volume, too little intensity, or the wrong sort of intervals? For example, intervals that will improve your performance in a crit race will not help much for the Haute Route.

The TSS score can give you insights into this. You should probably be averaging 400-500 TSS per week in the base period, 500-600 TSS in the build period and 600-700 in the pre-competition period. From the intensity standpoint, you should be doing plenty of intervals in Zones 4 and 5 and your recovery week load should be no more than half the other weeks.

Recovery

Last but not least, it is absolutely essential to build regular recovery weeks into your training programme. It has been said that the principal difference between the way that professionals train and the way that amateurs train is that amateurs don’t make their hard weeks hard enough and don’t make their easy weeks easy enough.

Training hard creates the stimulus necessary for the body to adapt and become stronger, but, and this is the key point, this adaptation can only take place when the body is resting. Recovery weeks are therefore an essential part of getting stronger, and it is during the recovery week that the adaptation takes place. To put it another way, training hard makes you weaker, recovery makes you stronger. Both work hand-in-hand.

Make sure your recovery week is easy enough!

Interested in a professional coach to guide you through this maze? Contact us for an initial chat.

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Alysoun
Alysoun
7 years ago

love your posts Marvin. Really helpful and very understandable. Thank you

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