You’ve got a few sportives under your belt; you’re fitter, and you’ve seen there is a competitive side to them. If you have not been actually comparing yourself with other riders, then you may have been competing with yourself and against the course. Doing the same event again in a faster time provides a real sense of achievement.
Then there’s the question of competing against other riders. You might have a bit of healthy rivalry going with a friend, or have your eye on a top-100, top-50 or even top-10 time. For older riders there is sometimes a separate list of times published per age group, as there is for men and for women. Progression like this is part of the challenge of cyclosportives.
Of course, you will improve if you have followed what has already been said in this book. Anyone who takes up anything new that involves a combination of self-knowledge, physical fitness, skill and experience, such as taking part in cyclosportives, can look forward to four or five years of natural progression.
However, there are ways of getting ahead of this progression curve, or at least working to enhance it. They involve looking again at how you train, emphasising different aspects of your training and learning new skills. You can also change the way you think about events, using mental skills to enhance your performance. You can even fine-tune your diet to give you significant performance gains.
Marginal gains_
The coaches who train British cyclists for the Olympics and other major competitions are some of the best in the world, as their athletes’ phenomenal results indicate. They use a philosophy called ‘marginal gains’, in which they look at every aspect of the discipline the athlete is involved in, and at his or her training and lifestyle, and see if it can be improved in a way that will make them faster.
It doesn’t matter how small a thing is: if it gives an advantage it’s worth adopting. The idea being that a lot of 1 per cent gains add up. String 10 together and you produce a 10 per cent better racer.
Without becoming obsessed, adopting the marginal-gains approach to your cycling will make you a better rider. Bear it in mind when you read this chapter, and when you do anything connected with your bike. Read books and magazines, think about your cycling, and if something sounds logical try it. Remember to write it down in your diary though, and write down what effect it had.
To do a faster time, to beat your rival and finish high up in your age group you have to ride faster, that’s obvious. To get faster your emphasis in training should focus more on speed and power than riding long distances. You need to increase the amount of the genetic VO2 max you can access, increase your threshold pace and increase your absolute power to become even more efficient. All these things will make you faster.
But boosting your speed isn’t just so you can ride a faster time on your own. It’s also to enable you take advantage of the group-riding dynamics that come into play at the front of cyclosportives. One important step you can take in this department is to take part in some road races.
Almost all over the world nowadays you will find entry-level or age-group road racing, in parks or on special bike-racing circuits. There’s no better place to learn the art of riding in a group, making and following attacks, and working in breakaways. These are skills that you can use to your advantage in cyclosportives.
Case history_
Peta McSharry rode the Etape du Tour about three years ago, soon after she had taken up cycling. She says: ‘I did some long rides to prepare and I managed it, just. I completed the course just inside the time limit. But I also found out that I really enjoyed cycling, so I started training harder and joined a cycling club. ‘They got me into racing, and they changed my training so that I was doing a lot more interval training but fewer long rides. Last year I was 12th lady in the Etape, as well as finishing 15th in my age group at the world road-race championships. I reckon a lot of my improvement was down to being faster and stronger, but it was also due to the tactics I learned from road racing.’
Group advantage
For the first sportives you do it’s best to ride conservatively at the start and build up your momentum throughout the event. Riding conservatively is the best tactic for a first timer, but once you know your strengths, and you become a bit fitter, you can get a little more ambitious and think tactically. This is where road-race experience comes in.
There will be strong riders in any sportive who force the pace and cause splits. Quite rightly you ignored this before, but now you are more ambitious it could pay you to react to such moves and get into a the group that’s pulling away from the rest.
You will need speed and power to do this, because such groups tend to leave the rest behind very quickly. Once the fast group are out of sight, their pace always settles down and you will feel more comfortable. However, the riders in such a group won’t like it if you follow along at the back. You should go through the line and take your turn at pace setting at the front of it.
It sounds complicated but you’ll soon see how breakaway groups form and work together. Watching bike racing on the TV will help you understand; so will taking part in some road races. It will also help you if you join a cycling club. These very often have coached group rides where road-race tactics are taught and practised.
Once you are in a fast group, even if you have to work hard when it’s your turn to set the pace, you will gain from the collective efforts of the rest of the riders, which is in keeping with our over-riding philosophy of speed for free.
But never do more work at the front of any group than the average amount the rest are doing. Do even less if possible – you have to be a bit selfish in these situations. It’s no good you doing powerful turns at the front, turns that pull the group away from those behind, and then exhausting yourself and getting dropped from it.
Try to stay with the group, even follow a further split if that happens. But don’t panic if you get left behind by the others. You will have gained time from riding in the group, and other groups will have formed behind you. Ride conservatively, checking behind by looking over your shoulder and get in at the back of the next group that catches you. Stay at the back for a bit too. It’s a funny thing but when a group catches a rider in a situation like this they don’t immediately expect the rider to work with the group.
To get into these groups it’s often necessary to ride really fast, sprinting and spending time at your VO2 max, so that aspect of your training must be emphasised. Once a group is formed you will have to ride close to and above your one-hour power when leading it, so level 3 intensity also needs to feature in your training. This entails speed training for its own sake, not just to make you more efficient and increase your average speed as you did it before.
Later in the chapter we’ll look at some more advanced speed and power sessions you can do, as well as threshold sessions. Before that though we need to visit an old friend.
Long rides revisited
Long rides still play an important part of your training if you want to become more competitive, but you don’t need to ride further or do additional long sessions. Two four-hour rides in a 12-week build-up, with a few other longish sessions of 2–3 hours’ riding at level 2 for some of the time, are all you need.
However, there is a way of doing your longest rides that will give you big gains, because it fully switches on the interleukin-6 response that we mentioned in chapter 4 (Sportive Demands) under Important discovery.
Be careful though, because these are not easy. Only one of your 4-hour rides in a 12-week build-up needs to be done like this. You should take sufficient food with you but don’t over-eat. It’s good to end these rides hungry, so don’t eat anything during the final half hour, unless you feel you are about to bonk and run totally out of fuel. You must also stay well hydrated during the ride. Don’t do long rides in too hot or cold conditions, and you must rest up before and after.
The way to do them is simple. Once you are warmed up push into low level 2, backing off to level 1 for 10 minutes after the first half hour. During the next half hour push through to upper level 2 by the end, before backing off for another 10 minutes of level 1. Repeat this low-level-2/upper-level-2-then-rest cycle for the rest of the ride, pushing to level 3 towards the end of the last half hour. You will be shattered, but it will be worth it.
These rides are quite stressful. They are meant to be simulations of a race-type effort, and you must treat them with respect. Eat and drink afterwards as though the session was a sportive event. But if you do everything about them wholeheartedly and with commitment, they will make you a stronger cyclist.
Strength training
Core-strength training is the most important training you can do away from your bike. However, if you are keen to improve you could well benefit from doing some general strength training, which will stimulate the production of the hormone testosterone, which plays a big role in your body’s ability to build stronger muscle fibres. Such strength training is especially important if you are a woman or a man over 40 because women produce less testosterone than men, and the amount of testosterone produced by men begins to fall once they pass 40.
Fast-twitch loss_
Nerves that stimulate fast-twitch muscle fibres tend to die before those that cause slow-twitch fibres to fire. This is why older cyclists should include speed training in their programmes, even doing full-on sprints as part of other rides. If you are over 40 get into the habit of doing two full-on sprints after warming up and before the main part of all your hard training sessions. You need all the muscle fibres you can recruit if you are going for a result in a cyclosportive, even fast-twitch ones because they add to the peak power you can produce – something you need on steep hills or if a group is forming that you want to be with. This really is a case of use it or lose it.
Cycling fact_
Training that provokes a response in the muscles to grow stronger doesn’t stimulate the growth of extra muscle fibres. You have a finite number of fibres, so what the stimulus does is cause your existing fibres to become stronger.
Strength training combats this in two ways. It stimulates the body to produce testosterone, and it directly stimulates the production of stronger muscle fibres. It also plays a huge part in another factor that can rob older people of muscle. As you get older the nerves that command muscles to contract and relax tend to die off, unless they are stimulated. And if enough nerves die, so does the muscle fibre they are connected to. And they don’t come back. Strength training, especially lifting heavy weights, keeps these nerves firing.
Strength training, particularly with weights, is something that requires specialist equipment and qualified instruction. Most commercial gyms offer both. Tell the fitness instructor that you are a cyclist and you want to be shown how to do the following exercises:
+ Leg press
+ Front squat
+ Back squat
+ Dead lift
These exercises can help you build the prime mover muscles in cycling. Focus on them and use them to create a progressive programme where you reduce the number of exercises you do while increasing the weight lifted per repetition.
Learn how each exercise should be done, and rigorously maintain good technique. Once you have each exercise down start training with 10 repetitions, and progress by increasing the weight lifted while reducing the number of lifts.
Training like this builds bomb-proof strength and power in your legs. Fit a progressive-weight training programme into each winter. Older riders should also fit a shorter programme in between each 12-week build-up to a cyclosportive. Everyone should try to do a gym session using at least one of these exercises and quite heavy weights each week to maintain gains.
Conditioning exercises
These are for your upper body, and you should take a different approach with them. You don’t want to build muscles in your upper body, just condition them. These exercises can also help guard against ‘round shoulders’ and other postural problems that can occur to cyclists. They help keep your rib cage and shoulders open, which helps your breathing. Useful conditioning exercises include:
+ Upper body exercises
+ Bench press
+ Bent-over row
+ Shoulder fly
+ Good morning exercise
Get a qualified trainer or fitness instructor to show you how to do each exercise. Do 3 sets of 10 repetitions of these exercises per session. To progress, build up the repetitions per set to 20 before adding weight. Use these exercises as part of your winter weights session, then include them once every two weeks during the spring and summer.
Cycling fact_
Cycling isn’t a load-bearing exercise, and if it has one drawback from a ‘promoting good health’ angle, that’s it. It is excellent exercise in every other aspect, but the bike carries your body, so your bones aren’t put under a load, which means they don’t get the stimulus that load-bearing exercise gives to maintain bone density. This isn’t an issue for young people, but it becomes one as you grow older, particularly for women. Weight training is load bearing and provides your bones with all the stimulus they need.
Home strength routine
There’s another aspect of strength training that you can address with some simple home exercises, and that’s targeting the smaller muscles that support the prime-mover muscles in your legs. These are muscles located deep in the back of your legs, your buttocks, around your knees and ankles, and in your lower back.
Treat the following exercises as core strengthening for your legs, and add them to your core-strengthening routine.
