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When I was 15, I got on a road bike for the very first time.
Enamored with the sport, I would head out two or three times a week on the same route - a three mile rolling road to the nearest village, where I would turn around and come back. There was no structure, other than trying to go faster than the previous attempt.
My first coach instilled in me the desire to train hard. We added hill reps to the equation. Tasked with 8 or 12, I would be expected to return home, exhausted, after only 5 or 6.
It’s not rocket science - this makes you fast.
It gave me an aerobic capacity that had professional potential. The path was set and the die was cast.
My best form came off the back of the worst winter in years. I was riding at 5.5w/kg, my weight was low 60’s, I could outsprint people 10kg heavier than me.
I’ll be honest with you: I never improved beyond my abilities in 2013/14.
This past week has seen me going through a lot of old paperwork. Part of that meant revisiting my old training plans from years gone by. I noticed a trend:
Mid-season: 20 to 30 hour weeks, 6 hour rides, intense intervals amongst hours and hours in the saddle and twice-weekly races.
A question: What exactly are you training for?
Suddenly, it clicked.
My form didn’t come in spite of that terrible winter. It was because of it; I was forced to do less volume and more intensity.
Don't get me wrong, building a solid base is important.
I remember seeing Marcin Bialoblocki’s winter training diaries - this is a man who has ridden the Giro d’Italia and has a top 10 in the Road World Championships to his name:
‘I ride in zone 2, with zone 3 on hills. It’s endurance-level stuff, with some tempo riding, so not threshold pace. I ride at 20 to 22 miles per hour.
I start with one-and-a-half hours every day for the first week then I add half an hour to each ride every week after that. As the rides get longer I set a range of time to do. I’m nearly at the end of my endurance phase, so this week the range is four to six hours.’
That’s solid foundation work; it takes a lot of time to build up and it’s progressive overload.
It’s also very manageable, sub-threshold work.
What it isn’t, is trying to lump 20 hours of tempo and endurance work alongside 10 hours of high intensity intervals. You can’t do that week after week. Especially not in the middle of the race season.
I lived with Alex Peters the year he signed with Team Sky. His winter training wasn’t much different to Marcin’s, and it was working for me too. However, in December 2014, disaster struck: I picked up a knee injury that kept me from training properly until February 2015.
I panicked.
Hours. Intensity. Everything. Throw the kitchen sink at it and hope it works. Rinse and repeat each season hoping something will stick. It didn’t.
No matter how hard I trained, I couldn't return to my previous form.
As a junior and fresh-faced U23, I didn’t do much more than 18 hours a week, more often doing less than 12 hours. I focussed on hill reps, sprints, and short efforts.
As an adult, I tried to maintain that intensity, but with 10 to 15 hours of extra aerobic work lumped on top.
If you’ve listened to my podcast episode with Richard Lang, you’ll know that recovery is top of the list for improvement. Those extra hours on the bike increase time to recover, decrease the time to recover in, and decrease the intensity with which you can train.
I dug a hole.
That hole, both physical and mental, saw me leave the sport entirely - I don’t want to see anyone else burnout like that.
First and foremost, people riding their bikes should do what they like, and there is no hard rule that will work for everyone.
But before you plan your training - especially as you might start to think about racing again - you should pay attention to the mistakes others have made.
Time and time again we see young riders underperforming, over-training, and leaving cycling behind.
Remember that, so often, getting dropped or losing the race is a by-product of not going fast enough. If you’re racing in the UK, train to go faster, not further.
Most importantly, do the training you like and keep it fresh.
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