“From pavement to dirt” is a new series I am writing about my experience taking up mountain biking and training to compete in the Sabertooth Offroad division of the Natural Caverns Duathlon. This will be my first mountain bike race, and I will use the Dirt Derby series and TXBRA cyclocross races to racing myself into shape. This week’s installment will cover training. The next post will be about the bikes I will use to train.

I have to admit mapping out a training plan is one of my favorite parts of preparing to do a race or challenging endurance event. It is a fresh start and everything looks so impressive laid out on the training calendar. There is no injury, sickness, work, or social obligations getting in the way. You can just see how things line up to the perfect preparation for your “A” event.

Of course, real life almost never works the way you planned. No matter how well you plan or how dedicated you are to the goal, something will get in the way of the plan. In some ways this is good. Sometimes plans are overly ambitious. Sometimes life tells you what is really important. As important as a good plan is, I think what is more important is that you have the acceptance and flexibility to dust off, get back to it, and make tweaks as necessary. This is not an out to ignore or abandon your plan, just to know that things may not go to plan and that’s OK. This is why many people benefit from a coach. They give you the experience and perspective to know when you need to push yourself and when you need to throw in the towel.

I’ve raced in some capacity for nearly ten years now, mostly triathlons. Most of that was as a solid back of the packer, but each season I saw improvement and a few years ago I broke through into the mid to front of the pack in my age group. I qualified for and competed at the National Age Group Triathlon and made the podium of another race for the first time. Today, I will share some of the things I have learned over the years in training for races that I hope will help you in your race or challenge event planning. I will be heavily tapping the training concepts of Joe Friel, the author of The Cyclist Training Bible and Triathlete Training Bible. I highly recommend you pick up one of these books if you are going to create your own training plan. I am going to go over general concepts of this sort of training philosophy, but these books have far more information and specific workouts. If you have not raced or trained much, I also highly recommend hiring a coach if you can.

Keys to a good plan

Over the last 50 years, there have been a lot of breakthroughs in understanding how the body responds to training and what produces the best results. In the old days, most training fell into one of two camps: grueling suffer-fests or relatively light non-specific training that relied on personal genetic gifts. We cannot all be Olympic medalists, but we can all improve and set person bests.

Specificity

The first key concept is specificity: you need to train for the sport and the event you are planning on participating in. This means while running is good for general health and fitness, it will do relatively little to improve your bike splits. It also means never riding your bike more than 20 miles is a poor preparation for a century ride. If an event is hilly, train in the hills. If it will be hot, ride in similar heat or add articles of clothing to simulate the heat.

Essentially, the closer you get to your target event, the more you want your training to mimic the environment and distance of the race. If you are doing a long distance ride like a century or 24 hour race, then you want at least a few of your training rides to be near the distance of this event. If you are preparing for a road race, you want to make sure you are doing plenty of group rides with pack riding, probably at a pace that is a little too fast for you. Not all workouts have to be about specificity, but these non-specific workouts should be weighted towards the beginning of your training period when you are working on general fitness and should be used sparingly as a break to stay fresh as you get closer to your target event.

Specificity also means trying to improve your weaknesses. There is an old racing motto, “Train your weakness, race your strength.” A lot of people focus on the parts of training they enjoy or are strongest at rather then where they need improvement. If you are training for cyclocross and you have plenty of speed, you want to focus your training on developing better handling skills. In my case with triathlons, cycling was my strength and I was OK at swimming so I focused mostly on improving my run splits and endurance. Not only was this my weakness, but in the case of triathlon, the run is where you can close gaps if you are strong or lose serious time if you are not.

Speed

Next on the list is learning to train with speed. Many newbies do not practice this and wonder why their performance stagnates after they see initial marked improvement from basic fitness. If you want to get faster, you need to train faster. This is done with interval workouts that push your lactate threshold and VO2 max (Zones 4 and 5 respectively for those familiar with zone training.) If you do not know what these terms mean, don’t worry. Most training books will spend several pages telling you more than you want to know about this. For general training planning, lactate threshold workouts occur at a pace just at the limit of your aerobic system and include intervals that you can maintain for 5 minutes or longer each. VO2 max workouts include intervals that push your body in the anaerobic zone and include intervals as short as 10 seconds but no longer than 3 minutes.

There are lots ways to know if you are in the right zone for these workouts. Power meters, heart rate monitors, pace, and perceived effort are all legitimate ways of making sure you are in the right place on your workout. I used heart rate monitors for several years but have gotten to the point where perceived effort works for me, i.e. I have a pretty good sense of what zone I am in by how my body responds. There are lots of good specific workouts out there, but I think the key is doing intervals with the time frames mentioned above. Do an interval workout of 3-5 intervals where you can maintain the fastest possible pace for each interval time and where the final interval is really hard to finish. If the last interval feels easy, you are not doing it fast enough. To prevent injury and burnout, each of these workouts should not be done more than once a week and can be replaced by a race which mimics the workouts.

Periodization and Recovery

The final and probably most important aspect of a training plan is periodization and recovery. Understanding when to peak and managing your recovery well will do more to improve your fitness than the hard workouts.

Periodization means that not only do you need to build fitness over time but also that the body cannot maintain the highest level of fitness and speed indefinitely. You will reach a peak fitness at some point in your training, and your body will only be able to maintain that level for a few weeks. It is best to have your top priority race or event during this peaking time.

Traditionally, training plans that fully use periodization start about 3-4 months before the target event. The plans are divided into base periods in the first half of the plan where the focus is building enough endurance to finish the event and the build and peak periods where you build the speed you are looking for while gradually ratcheting back the distance. If you are doing an event that really pushes your endurance and your goal is simply to finish, the build period is often replaced by more base before you drastically reduce volume in the peak period a few weeks before the target event.

During each period, you divide the plan into 3-4 week mini periods. During the base period, each week you add no more than about 10% to your longest workout or to total workout volume for the week. As you move into the build period, you stop increasing the volume and instead increase the intensity by adding the speed focused workouts mentioned above. Every 3rd or 4th week is designated a recovery week which gives the body a chance to catch up on the physiological changes your training is creating. During these weeks, you reduce total volume and your longest workout by about 25% and reduce or eliminate the speed workouts.

During any particular training week, you should have a breakthrough workout where you focus on targeted improvement. In your endurance building base period, this will be your longest workout while in the build and peak period where your body has adapted to the long rides these will cease to be breakthroughs and just maintenance. In your build period, the breakthrough will be your speed workouts. The key here is to make these workouts really count by not allowing other workouts to compete. This means you want only 1-2 breakthrough workouts a week with all your other workouts either skills work or rides at a slow recovery or endurance distance speed. Avoid having all your workouts feeling the same which neither pushes the body enough to make physiological change or allows enough recovery to be fresh and ready for your next breakthrough workout.

Applying these principles to my training plan

I started my training plan for the Natural Caverns Duathlon in August which is giving me about a 3 1/2 month period to get ready for the race. Since the race is relatively short for my endurance level (2 mile run/12 mile MTB/2 mile run), my focus has been less on endurance than building speed and technical skills. I am new to mountain biking so developing my bike handling skills will be critical. Following the rules of specificity, my August workouts used long 40 mile plus road rides as an easier way to build endurance while curtailing the road workouts and replacing them with mountain bike and cyclocross workouts in September, October, and November to work on improving skills. I will do regular cyclocross skills sessions and try to attend some mountain bike clinics as well. Likewise, my running workouts include more trail and cross country running as we get into fall.

Since it has been a while since I raced regularly, I have decided to include a heavy racing schedule starting in late September up to the Duathlon. When you use racing to train, these races are treated like breakthrough workouts with no special peaking or reduced training volume included. These events are raced hard, but finishing placement and overall performance are not the critical focus.

I will be racing the Dirt Derby on Tuesday nights each week with a 5K run and some cyclocross races thrown in along the way. Not only is this good to test out equipment but allows a more varied and often more demanding speed breakthrough workout than solo training can provide. From my own experience, I know that I do endurance workouts very well and am pretty good at staying the course on lactate threshold workouts. High intensity, VO2 max workouts on the other hand are the bane of my training plans. I have a very difficult time making myself do these workouts so the racing, especially the constant cycle of red lining in cyclocross, will make me get these done.

Summary

If you are new to training, all this information will likely be overwhelming. This is where a coach can really help. They understand these concepts and apply them to both your fitness level and target event goal.

If you decide to self coach, be sure to check out the Training Bible books for more details and create a written plan. A physical plan helps keep you honest and on track and can help you see if your goals is too ambitious for your fitness level or amount of free time.