July & August. What I think about when I am training
Saturday. Today I run through everything in a session exactly as it should be, the way I would with clients. This makes a change from the usual slapdash, trying to squeeze it in between sessions approach.
Doing it properly, all the right things in the right order, is hard. It takes patience and and a conscious awareness of why you are doing what you are doing. Either that or in my clients case someone to oversee it for you. Perhaps like other trainers I know I need a personal trainer.
Sunday. Based largely on a dare I ride home to Gloucestershire from Surrey, 94 miles which I decide to do early in the morning.
I have lived in large cities and I realise the disconnect from others, the avoiding of eye contact, not greeting strangers in the street. The jogger I pass, the only other soul around at 5.45 a.m on a tiny Surrey lane miles from anywhere was surely taking too far when he blanked me completely.
Other people’s perception of the ride was intriguing. Earlier in my training I had ridden 10 miles further and up many vicious Cotswolds climbs but at no point was I more than 20 miles from home. I rode 120 miles around the mountains of South Wales as part of a cycling event. Both of these longer, far harder rides seemed to impress people less than a largely flat, A to B commute, possibly because it’s a similar journey to one undertaken often in cars. There is something about driving that exaggerates the distance, despite the comparative speed of the journey. Is it because for many people a long distance bike ride is outside their experience whereas a typical car journey is easy to make comparisons with ?
Towards the end of the ride and just outside Gloucestershire I suffer a Wiltshire overtake. This phenomenon isn’t limited to that particular county it just seems to happen there more than anywhere else. The gist of it is that a driver shaves your right leg with his car and once well past you courteously swings over to the wrong side of the road for 200 feet. It combines danger, pointlessness, incompetence and idiocy all in one 5 second manoeuvre.
Thursday, Sprint intervals. Planning to do a mountain bike race as preparation for the big event in a little over two weeks I change my training to take into account the specifics of a mountain bike race. Going back to an earlier comment about the nerdiness of training, you can get highly nerdy/ specific with this stuff: the demands of a long day in the saddle, dragging yourself up long, gradual climbs are different to the 90 minute sprint that is a mountain bike race. In particular, the first minute, that nose-to-the-tyre, teeth-gritted hammer to get ahead of the riders who will do the best bit of their race in the first quarter mile and then act like a bath plug for the riders behind them, bringing the race to a slow trickle as they huff and puff, fall off and try to ignore the protests from the rear.
This is easy to replicate and train for with power meters. You look at the data from a previous race and just re-enact the opening minute over and over, your eyes on the power meter all the while.
The hard part is actually doing it. It’s a flat out, all you have 30 seconds, followed by another 30 seconds at a not quite sustainable level. Take 5 minutes off and repeat. 5 of these efforts today. The misery of this is hard to convey. After the first effort I’m jelly-legged and faintly queasy. The faint queasiness becomes overt nausea as the repetitions progress. By the fifth repeat the power figures are starting to fall off and my legs feel like they also might. Time to stop and crawl back.
JULY THOUGHTS
Sunday. I’ve started the taper, the winding down towards the big event. It feels odd to be doing rides of half the usual kind of distance. It also feels good – no grumpy Monday, the usual response to a hard Sunday ride, as a result. There’s a weird mental response to the taper: I’m already thinking of what the next challenge will be.
Tuesday, Spinning class. Watching the Tour (de France of course, what other Tour could there be ?) is giving me inspiration. I can feel those threshold efforts mirrored in the onscreen action as I watch the telly. In the class I can draw upon that same feeling. Working hard, pushing hard is easier with that memory.
Thursday. The dark side of threshold training, or any training gone too far. I’m under-recovered. The ride feels horrible, leaden legs, everything in my mind and body saying ‘No !’. This one gets a premature death.
Sunday. The last Sunday before the big event. Short, feeling ludicrously so, but sharp to make up for it. Everything feels right, everything flows. Keeping a lid on it is harder than hammering as hard as possible. So much training has gone into feeling this good. Feeling this good seemed to happen a lot more often 10 years ago.
Friday. Cyclist and fans of theTour de France, brace yourself for this sentence: today I do intervals on the Col du Tourmalet. How can I make this equate to other sports ?
‘Today I putt a few at St. Andrews’?
‘I take the car for a spin at Monza’?
‘I shoot some penalties at Wembley Stadium’?
It’s a wonderful peculiarity of road cycling that the world’s elite perform within feet of the (non-paying) public, using the same arena that is open to rank amateur and professional alike.
This much is obvious through the foothills and then into the Pyrenees, en route to the Tourmalet as the drive is an increasingly faltering series of overtakes past two wheeled worshippers toiling their way towards the shrine, an icon of road cycling, a climb rarely omitted from the route of the Tour that changes annually.
As I have discovered in the past the weather on the climb is either rain, cold and mist or fierce heat and sun. Today it is the latter and the Pyrenees, free from a misty shroud are in sharp focus and absolutely stunning. It’s a joy just to be here and see these views. To a large extent this is why people enjoy road cycling, less for the cycling than for where it takes place. Labouring round the outskirts of Swindon on a snowy December morning seems worth it now. You invest those days for the pay back here and now.
My accomplice Mark and I set off from the foot of the climb, the archetypal mountain town of Luz St. Sauveur, a handful of miles from the Spanish border. My plan is to ride a couple of threshold efforts with a short break, getting as far up the climb as I can whilst still leaving something in the legs for the event in two days time. Mark is aiming to do the entire climb. His training plans for the event were sabotaged by an unhelpful lifestyle and a failure of will power. The route of the event is brutally tough and requires an all or nothing approach- you either do the training or you won’t complete the ride.
Fifteen minutes taking it easy uphill, already passing a few riders, then just lifting the pace. Threshold rides uphill are easy to achieve, the effort involved in just dragging yourself and the bike upwards is a major part of the requisite power prescription. Speaking of which, having trained for 8 months using a power meter, which doubles as a bike computer, I’ve left the damn thing at home. This could cause me some trouble during the event but by this point I’m pretty good at gauging what the correct effort feels like and so give it 20 minutes hard but sustainable.
It’s a stunning ride. On the early slopes the Tarmac is smooth and fast. Steep-sided hills, lush and green at the bottom, bare rock and then snow patches at the top, drop sharply down to the river valley that guides the road upwards. After the mountain village of Bareges the valley widens and glinting up ahead, looking impossibly remote halfway up in the sky, is the summit. I won’t be getting there today but that is the goal – within a specific time limit – for two days time.
Today however, requires prudence and a reigning-in of instinct. Two thirds of the way up and both intervals done I freewheel at up to 40 mph down to the car.
Soon afterwards Mark arrives. After less than 4 of the 11 miles of climbing he’d been beaten, a reminder of just how tough the riding here is, how dedicated to your training you have to be to attempt an event like the one coming up.
And to put that into another perspective, the stage of the Tour de France I ride, where this climb is one of three comparable climbs that day, is just one day in three weeks that the professionals must ride.
Saturday. Recovery from training is the essential counterpoint to the efforts made. Sleep is a, if not the key element. So it is both frustrating and infuriating that some idiot English family have brought their idiot dog to the hotel with them where it barks idiotically all night. No one in the hotel, the majority of whom are here for the same reason as us, get to sleep properly.
Mark attempts the Tourmalet again today. Tourmalet 2, Mark 0. Race preparation, watching the Tour in French, eating, sleeping.
Sunday. The event. Through partial sleep hours the alarm call eventually arrives. In the dark we get up and drive along the motorway to the start town already teeming with cyclists, dressed for a 30 degree, cloudless day whilst moving through twilight and 15 degrees. The excitement and anxiety has to be tempered to get through the careful preparation, avoiding stupid last-minute accidents and the hour-long wait on the start line.
‘Start line’ isn’t accurate since I am in a pen containing 3000 other riders, 5000 back from those on the actual start line. Above us residents of Pau in their high rise apartments look down, bemused. Enterprising brasserie owners open up rapidly.
More than anything else my biggest challenge today will be to try to get a good finish time having made my way past literally thousands of other, slower riders jammed into narrow French village roads. Understandably, once we finally get going, many riders are going at a pace suitable for a non-competitive cyclist looking at 117 miles through the Pyrenees, taking in three long climbs, the last of which, after 11 uphill miles, brings the route to an end at 2115 meters above sea level on the Col du Tourmalet.
I’m keen to get a ‘Gold’ standard again and this means a high average pace. So for every congested standstill, every chatty group spread across the road like a dragnet I have to subsequently sprint to get the average speed back up. It feels like a road race both in terms of the physical demands and the mental ones: constantly looking out for someone ahead swerving, having to ask then demand that riders do as they are meant to by riding slowly on the right, overtaking on the left. The demands start politely then get aggressive. A British race jersey (and there are many) get ‘Move right, Brighton, move RIGHT!’. French, Belgian or unmarked jerseys get ‘A gauche, a gauche !’
It’s full-on race mode for the first 40 miles. I’m aware the weather is a little murky, cloudy and misty but in a way that promises sun rather than threatens rain. Occasionally I see trees and Alpine-like meadows or small villages but mostly I see riders, thousands of them filling the road up, slowing me down.
There is a Category 4 climb early on, in Tour de France terms only just acknowledgeable. In the UK a 1.5 mile climb up a 6.6% gradient would be a big deal but here it’s just a warm up. Nonetheless, the moment the gradient kicks up people appear to go backwards and inevitably spread further across the road. ‘A gauche ! ‘
By the first real test of the day, the Col de Marie Blanque, I have done the equivalent of my last road race back home. To begin, the climb is easy and having whittled my way through to the 2-3000 numbered riders people seem to know what they are doing more, there is more of a race-head discipline in evidence.
The climb steepens, hard enough that you imagine it must ease up around the next densely wooded bend. It doesn’t and instead displays a straight line ahead, hundreds of riders wending their way up in eerie silence, bent double over the bars, each person focussing on the effort. To the left a steep, green-sided hill is bathed in sunlight, mist rising from the valley below. The road surface is wet from mist and I know this because I would rather focus on the road below me than the view up ahead. This hurts now, more than I remember it doing the last time I rode this event.
There’s a strange disparity between the eternity this climb takes and the relentless racking up of the metres, tens of metres then kilometres on my newly bought bike computer. This is the endurance athletes friend, the mental arithmetic, the focus on the sure and steady, something to measure the progress when it feels like the climb will never end. How do you run a marathon? One step at a time.
The descent mirrors the climb but the road, wet in places, dry in others, the shade then sun baffling eyes shielded by sunglasses, is potentially dangerous and so despite the average speed function on the computer yelling at me I can’t let the leash off totally.
In the floor of valley I realise I have made it into the company of other well-experienced riders as groups form, chain gangs going ‘though and off’, sharing the time spent at the front, in the wind, so that as a group the average speed is far higher than any one individual could manage alone for the same duration.
Again the focus is such that I am not really aware of the surroundings. We are between high mountains. There are fields, cows. In places it seems more like the Alps than the Pyrenees. Up ahead is the Col de Soulor, a new climb for me but one that has been played down by those I consider experts.
The road narrows, the surface quality degenerates. I am aware of individual riders now, noticing people who are keeping a similar pace. I’ll sneak onto a back wheel now and again, take a tow or just have the pace set, hoping I don’t get spotted and yelled into doing an equal share of the work.
On it’s own the Soulor may not be that intimidating a climb but by this point I’m pretty toasted and it’s hard going. Heart and lungs don’t seem to mind – the intensity isn’t all that high – but muscles have done a lot of hard miles already and it’s been a couple of months since I rode uphill for this long – a 30 minute climb is nothing out here but impossible to find in the UK.
The descent of the Soulor is a joy. I hit 50 mph at one point and at another a French rider hits the road, hard, after pulling alongside at close to the same speed and having his hands knocked off the bars by an unnoticed bump. “Merde !” seems an understatement in the circumstances.
The road up to Luz St. Sauveur is a long, hot drag, slightly uphill all the way. There’s little cooperation in the groups that form, everyone is looking for someone else to work, so the average speed comes down accordingly. I know already I won’t make the ‘Gold’ time after the holds ups so far but I still want as good a time as I can. At one point I turn around to see I am pulling a group of around 50 riders.
In one way it was a mistake to ride the Tourmalet so soon beforehand. It means I know the first two thirds well. Within the first 5km I am right on the limit, dispirited by the knowledge that this is not even the hardest of the 13 remaining kilometres. By this point there are already scores of riders sitting or lying by the side of the road, resting, drinking or puking. Some are walking – the ultimate humiliation for a cyclist.
This blog is supposed to be about what I’m thinking. What occupies my mind as I toil up through the 30º heat comes down to this; This really hurts. How much longer ? And at one point it occurred to me that for the big names of the Tour it wouldn’t be until this point that their race would begin.
Had I not ridden 106 miles before the start of the climb with a combination of sprint intervals and threshold efforts it would have been a joyous, hour long romp up one of the most scenic climbs of the Tour. As it is, the last hour of the 98 minutes the climb takes me today is spent counting down the metres, 10 at a time. It is unrelentingly gruelling, down to the last metre.
Afterwards, judging this to be the hardest ride – with comprehensive competition – I have done, it strikes me as bizarre that there is not the same system in place that running races have, a self-gridding process based on your estimated finish time – quicker competitors start in front of slower ones. It was always going to be a hard ride, no doubt, but did it need to be made harder for those riders forced to race past slower ones in order to get a decent result ?
August.
Holiday. I don’t see holiday as an opportunity to take a break from exercise, in the same way that I don’t stop eating or drinking or sleeping. OK, so it’s clearly a possibility to survive without exercise whereas sleep deprivation will at some point start taking the initiative on your behalf but like most people accustomed to exercise I can feel the need for it building up very quickly.
Holiday exercise is different in that it is more flexible, more in tune with informal rhythms. There’s a flow to it that depends entirely on how your body feels, none of this ‘it’s Tuesday, I will be doing intervals’. It’s really how exercise should be done, working hardest when you feel best, talking it easy when everything still hurts. Isn’t so much of holiday how things should really be done, at least for the first few, schedule-free days ?
I had, of course, nerdily scripted my holiday work outs. The plan didn’t even get looked at once I’d got off the plane. I let curiosity take control by trying barefoot running, 30 second intervals along the beach just after dawn.
Before flying out I had contemplated buying a piece of expensive portable equipment to take with me but decided this wasn’t a challenging scenario for someone who should be creatively professional about exercise. So, my poor children have to accompany the weirdest dad on the beach as he fills 2 used water containers – a 5 litre and a 1 litre – with wet sand. Using these and some body weight exercises (crab walks, planks, pull ups, push ups and more) I get some 500 calorie, 40 minute sessions done. The heart rates are very similar to Spinning classes, or the running intervals. The aches are impressive (meaning almost debilitating) initially and a 2 days hard, 1 day easy or off pattern develops.
It’s hard to tell if it’s the intensity of these exercises or the result of spending the majority of the time barefoot but I’m aching basically every day. It’s tempting to think this is my posture paying me back once I cast aside the artificial props of modern footwear. Or is this the appeal of the barefoot trend exerting an undue influence ?
Aching or not I’m in no hurry to get back to whatever training I have next being done in under grey, cold skies.
The first Wednesday class of the year, the 4th, is a FREE CLASS ! All are welcome so bring a friend - just let us know you’re coming.
Liam’s so keen for everybody to experience just how fun and effective this Mixed Martial Arts-style fitness class is that his first class of 2012 is FREE ! Just let him know you’re coming and a bring a friend.
with existing classes. She’s keen to do a Thursday early evening class so we’d like to hear from anyone who might be interested in this.
