Ramblings about intense training during the off-season.

It’s weird how returning to the basics of training can often improve your fitness more than the honing effects of peaking for specific events. Maybe it’s because I feel less stress now than when I had to perform perfectly on “race” day. Or maybe it’s because I’m just getting the rest/recovery I needed all along or because I’m re-including the foundation training that I need to support the extreme efforts that I continue to do to keep my level of fitness reasonably high. I imagine that a good portion of the improvements are coming from my inclusion of a couple of ferociously intense efforts in the “pain cave” each week. I think the infamous Ultramarathon man, Dean Karnazes, used the expression: “If it doesn’t require extraordinary effort, you’re not pushing hard enough.” Whatever the case, I feel amazingly strong and fit right now—both with my high end sustainable power and with my muscular strength. In fact, I’d bet I’m stronger now than I was during this entire year in both explosive and sustained climbing power and in distance riding.

This begs an interesting question. Why do I continue with high-end fitness training during the off-season when my target events are 10 months away? Don’t I need a period of low-end base training or mental freshness to restart my training year? Probably…to some extent. But I suppose these perspectives don’t satisfy my desire to continually improve. And I’m afraid if I give myself an inch, I’ll take a mile, when it comes to relaxation. I think many athletes sacrifice more of their hard-earned fitness than they need to by over-resting and reducing nearly all their intense training efforts for the sake of “base-training” during the off-season.

I won’t try and convince others of any of my unorthodox training perspectives nor do I feel the need to justify why I like to push hard regularly and adhere strictly to the adage “Quality over Quantity”. I’d rather just worry about what I like to do. In fact, one question that has crossed my mind a lot recently is: “Why would my body adapt to a higher level of exertion and sustainability, if it’s already capable of doing what I demand of it?” Doesn’t the obvious response to this question apply year round?

While I know It’s normal to live in cycles of varying volume and intensity throughout the training week/month/year, I think an athlete has to regularly “remind” his/her body of exactly what (an)aerobic suffering is, if they don’t want to lose too much ground in the off-season. After all, in nearly every other pursuit in life, I’m expected to be at some minimum level of performance and can’t simply take a complete “off” season from life to rest for long from the challenges I face. Why should I think this principle doesn’t apply to training too?

I guess this banter just means one thing for me if I plan on cyclically, yet continually, getting fitter—even during the off-season. I’ve got to ‘put up’ or ‘shut up’. This includes my continuing efforts to try and eat fewer doughnuts and keep up a variety of complementary activities that all contribute to my end goals. And of course, I’ll make sure the intensity is occasionally high enough to bring on blood-shot eyes and a viscerally fierce pain that elicits a deep training stimulus for me to keep getting stronger.

Have fun!

J-Naut

Off-season training

So here are the basics:

My main objective for now is to drop some pounds and 'reset' my body for a tough year to come. For the next several months I'll be doing about 75-90 mins of base conditioning each weekday morning, combining both jogging and spinning. The spinning is specific to my efforts and helps with biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Although non-specific to cycling, the jogging helps a bit with mental freshness, joint strength, muscular balance (think hamstrings) and flexibility, impact tolerance, and because I'm so inefficient at it, I burn more calories than spinning for the time invested. Also, it will prep me a bit to survivie the SLC marathon in April.
For the base work I'm keeping my HR at around 65% of max (ie. 125 bpm) to hopefully gain a bit more metabolic efficiency, while not overworking (which will just tempt me to overeat). On Saturday mornings, I'll do between 3-4 hrs of mixed training and with the same lower HR. My total base hours will be around 10+ hrs.

To rebuild my structural strength and my muscular fatigue resistance in the off-season, I'll do some high rep squats 1-2 times per week. It will take me 2 months to *comfortably* get to 3 sets of 100 reps with a 95 lb bar (at about 40 reps/min). And usually the weight is low enough and the reps high enough that I don't hypertrophy much. Instead I typically gain a huge amount of muscular tolerance and endurance, while keeping my bone density up and my joint strength high. Depending on weight loss, I may work up to the same sets/reps with 135 lbs. Man these hurt! But in the end, my legs are much more capable of pushing serious power and the strength work complements the pure base training well for me.

Finally, I'll add in 2 brief "pain cave" sessions per week, which tends to keep my anaerobic threshold high and my mind happy. The pain sessions and the weights will add up to around 2 hrs per week, which is roughly 15% of my total hours.

For a significant portion of the training, I'll work with Brutus, who is amazing at motivating me when I don't want to train, and who is willing to suffer until he absolutely has nothing more to give. Also, I'll be in regular contact with B-Horn to keep on track with my diet and efficiency. B-Horn is immensely knowledgable about nearly every aspect of training and diet and has proven more than anybody that he can even break my bad eating and training habits. What's more, he has changed his own body from a grande burrito to a lean machine, so he knows exactly what I'm up against.

I'll detail more as the weeks progress.

J-Naut

New Beginnings

Superior firepower. Supreme conditioning. Brute Force.