Hey Team!

This week’s Coach’s Corner is all about laying out your season. First we’ll talk about the different priority types of races. That will lead into the training phases themselves. We’ll touch upon training cycles then finally how to lay out the season!

For most of us that race, we usually have specific races in mind. Races that we want to target and do our best at. We call these our “A” races. In cycling terms, we have three levels of races A, B and C. The easiest way to think about what that means is this: “A” races are the ones you want to do your best at. you’ll taper into it and be the freshest possible. B races will be less important, but a race you still want to do well at. These usually will have different goal. I like my “B” races to be pretty similar in course/effort to my A races. Thes leaves a good gauge as to how you’re going, and will show you what you need to improve on when getting closer to your A race. “C” races are best thought of as really good workouts. You train through them, and include the race as one of that week’s workouts. The most important thing to remember is that most athletes can generally only peak once, maybe twice, a season. Start by picking what your “A” race will be, then work backwards from there. Now we have to talk about the different phases during training.

Training Phases: I generally use 4 phases during the year: base, build, peak and transition. Base season is the beginning part of your season. Base is exactly how it sounds. You’re building your base. The stronger your base, the better your peak. A typical Base season is anywhere from 12 to 20 weeks depending on schedule/life. I personally find 14-16 weeks wonderful. As I stated in my first email. I love sweet spot training. I try to do 20 weeks of sweet spot. This sets the groundwork for the next phases. You’ll hear me say “switching from base to race” a lot. This is where the meat and potatoes lie. I’ll also say “sharpening the knife” equally as much. Base phase is building and assembling the knife. Build phase is sharpening it. There’s a stark contrast of effort from base to race. base phase is a lot of sub threshold especially with sweet spot. Build phase is exclusively at or above threshold. you’ll completely avoid the middle ground here. you’re either at or above threshold, or zone 1. A big mistake most cyclists make is zone 3 syndrome. They’re never riding hard enough for adaptation while simultaneously not riding easy enough to recover. Zone 3 feels wonderful. You go fast, you’re not completely blown out after and you feel like you did some good work, but not hard enough to increase fitness, and not easy enough for your body to heal. Next is the Peak phase. This can also be referred to as taper. This phase is short, generally 5-10 days depending on individual preferences and training load. They are similar to a rest week. A good place to start is by keeping the intensity, but halving the volume. The goal here is to reduce your training load and let the body recover to be at your absolute prime come the race. After the race we transition. Transition can be a couple of things. What determines what that is is the proximity of the next races. For most, transition can be a week to 10 days to recover and analyze the race than jump into base or build again. For those on the crit calendar, it’s usually back into build, for longer time between races, maybe a week or two of base, then a week or two of build, then back into race/transition. There is a third option here: some of us race 3 out of 4 weekends. In this case, you’d treat each week slightly differently depending on when your “A” race is. Say you’re 3 weeks out from your “A” race. i would treat the first 2 races as C priority, training through the, with the 3rd week being a recovery, taper week into the “A” race. I’d also recommend a slightly longer transition phase after a calendar like this. Choose your races wisely…

Training cycles! There are two main training cycles: 3 and 4 week. The 4 week cycle is 3 weeks on, 1 week off. The 3 week cycle is 2 weeks on 1 week off. You can play around with these and figure out what works best for you. I personally switched this past season to a 3 week cycle and even though it was my worst season yet mileage/time/result wise, I did feel stronger more consistently. I’m excited to put together a better season this year using this cycle. As I said above, this is where planning the recovery and transition phases has a big outcome on your performance.

Your ATP: ATP, or Annual Training Plan, is what the year looks like. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend picking a copy of Joel Friel’s training bible. It describes in way more depth all of this if that’s something you’d be interested in. Setting up your plan is easier than you think. Once you decide on your one or two “A” races, work backwards from there. Plan for about 20-24 weeks ahead of your A race. This will allow for 16 weeks of base and 4-8 weeks of build. As years go, you’ll also learn what works best for you. You may do better with 4 weeks of build and 20 of base. When setting this up, you also have to decide what kind of training cycle, 3 or 4 weeks. Now the hard part of setting up your ATP is how much to increase each week. This is where applications like wahoo systm, training peaks, final surge etc which will lay out a “ramp rate”. While I haven’t used final surge, wahoo systm is really good and I personally use training peaks for all of my athletes/myself. when building out your ATP in training peaks, they use some specific metrics to them that make laying out the year super simple. You may have heard of TSS, this is what Training Peaks uses.
For the TLDR: I’m focusing on Somerville this year as my “A” race. Somerville is 27 weeks out. My goal is to do 18 weeks iof sweet spot, with the remainder being build weeks going into somerville. I want to hit the early season branchbrook crits, and if things go as we are planning, there may be a practice crit in our neck of the woods this year. These races and practices will all be “C” priority. As an additional random tip: I love our TT’s as FTP tests. They’re perfectly spaced out to continue updating the workload!

I hope that helps take some of the stress away from planning your season! as always reach out with any questions!!

Happy pedaling!