I've been thinking about writing this post for a few weeks now. Let's see how well I do. What started out as a "fitness for use" type of chronicle, expanding on something I read on Joe Friel's blog last month, tonight morphed into something almost completely different.
"Adaptation to a specific physical stress is called “fitness.”
So we train to get fit. Personally, I don't buy into ultra-specificity when it comes to my training. I believe that can lead to what I call the dull edge. But that's another matter. Joe is talking about things in a more general sense here. What you do prepares you to do what you do. So what are you trying to do? Most of my audience also reads our friend Hilljunkie. Dougie often refers to his death march rides as being "of dubious training value." But are they? Hilljunkie's primary schtick is doing these maximum climbing and mileage in one day, last person standing kind of rides. Doing them prepares him to be good at doing them.
The same sort of thing applies to doing pushups. Mostly they make you fit to do more pushups. Running stairs, ditto. If you go out and ride and stare at your average speed, then you'll probably get better at maintaining a high average speed. That's cool if your focus competitions require it, like time trials or multisport. And that's cool if it's something you enjoy doing. A lot of us started out that way.
Of course, all of these things have some side effect benefits that do crossover to other activities. Let's look again at Death Ride Dougie and the 10,000 vertical feet in 100 miles Saturday ride. It has the side effect of getting him strong enough to ride the front at real races. Maybe if he didn't hit the first climb like it was a $20 hooker then there would be even more benefits and less dubiousness. But that's not the goal. He has some fun and gets fitter for other things in the process. Maybe not as effectively as with some targeted psycho workout (that some people even pay to be told to do), but effective just the same. Or close to it. He even wins sometimes. Hard to argue with that.
But what if you are a "serious competitor," concerned only with your performance in competitions, specifically bicycle road races ('cuz that's what we do here), and want to "train" to "get fit" and get better at road racing. What to do? Well, that depends on how much you suck now. If you don't really suck, and you're not getting dropped, you're occasionally making the break, getting in the money, that sort of thing, but still yearning for improvement, well, maybe you've come to the wrong place. You already knew that though. You don't come here for training advice. How about if you do suck, pretty badly, most of the time? Off the back is your home. Getting dropped is a given. Your crit race reports start off with how many laps you lasted before getting the hook. Now we're talking. Specifically, we're talking about the moment.
The Moment. Heavy on the italics tonight.
You don't win a road race in a single moment. You do lose them that way though. At some point, the race gets really, really hard. Often this involves a climb, or the chase after a climb, but sometimes, especially in crits, it's just pressure at the front, things string out, gaps begin to open. Either way, you find yourself on the wrong side of a split. This is the moment you've been training for.
Even the good riders we were talking about two paragraphs ago find themselves in this situation. The winning break is forming, and the train is leaving the station. You know what you have to do, but can you do it? Can you dig a little deeper and respond to what is happening, even though it hurts, even though it would be so much easier to just give up and let it go? *
Web 2.0 brings us lots of Monday morning director sportifing (I just made that up) and oftentimes we read Fred Studley's race report and he writes something like "I could have done it but for some reason I didn't. Next time I have to dig deeper. I have to make myself suffer." That is so much bull. Suffer is so totally overused by bike racers, it makes me suffer to read about this alleged suffering. Fred didn't do it because he couldn't. He blew. He cracked. Yeah sure, there is a mental component, but I'm here telling you that miracles don't happen very often. You can dig all you want but if you're digging into every last gram of so-called mental toughness that you have, chances are you're just delaying the inevitable. Without the fitness to back it up, all the mental toughness in the world won't turn a chess player into a bike racer.
So that brings us to the point of this mess. I could be watching Stewart or 30Rock on hulu right now, but instead I extol this wisdom upon my faithful masses, all forty of you. Train for the moment. You can fake it for the entire rest of the race, and nobody will know. But you can't fake it at the moment. If you can't produce the goods at that instant, then you're gonna get shelled. Serves you right to suffer, serves you right to be alone. Off the back. Loser. Thanks for reading.
*paraphrased from a book by Tom Doughty
BTW, if you're good, maybe tomorrow night I'll let you stay up past bedtime again and I'll tell you about the time I cracked, got dropped on the climb, recovered, chased back on with my entire (also dropped) team in tow, then broke away and won the race, solo. Hey, I said miracles were rare, I didn't say they never occur...
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