Winter Training As mentioned last week, this is an important time of year for cycle training. There is only one thing to remember – long and slow. This isn’t advice from Swiss Tony’s ‘Guide to Making Love to Beautiful Women’ but relates to winter cycling duration and pace. What we are trying to achieve is building your aerobic capacity by concentrating on training at relatively low intensity and long duration. Working at between 60 and 70% of maximum heart rate for three-quarters of your training time is the key. This can then be supplemented by a few higher intensity turbo sessions or some short sharp rides where you ride the hills hard or do some short intervals at a higher pace. If you can get in a 2 to 3 hour slow ride on the weekend and maybe a 1 to 2 hour slow ride during the week, this would be a good winter base, with a 30 to 60 minute turbo, short tempo or hill rep session once a week to remind your legs that they are in for a damn good spanking later in the season! Use a heart rate monitor religiously (and I don’t mean just on Sundays) and make sure you keep ‘in the zone’, even if you have to use the ‘granny’ gears. Don’t be tempted to work at a higher intensity just because you are feeling good and don’t try and ‘race’ other riders or try and keep up with them on the hills. With little daylight in the evenings you can get a good session by cycling around a town or village where there are good street lights. In Tenby, for instance, a good session would be to do, say, 5 hill reps on the Maudlins, with a recovery of cycling down Serpentine Road and Heywood Lane. Other circuits can be done around Upper Hill Park or Narberth Road. Make sure you have a good 10 minute warm up before starting and try and keep at the same effort for each interval. Don’t forget to spend a couple of minutes 2 or 3 times a week on core stability exercises, strengthening your abs and back muscles. ‘I have so why don’t you’ Happy cycling The Coach Questions to the Coach Q. Dear Coach, I always have a problem with botty gas when I’m cycling (name and address withheld for legal reasons). A. Dear Anon. Involuntary, audible, olfactorially detectable, anal trumpeting as it is known in the trade, or ‘dropping one’ to you and me, is not a barrier to being a successful cyclist. But you need to train hard on controlling your sphincter and use it to your advantage. Remember Lance Armstrong’s famous victory on Alpe D’Huez in 2002 when he dropped one on Jan Ulrich. Poor Jan never recovered and Lance went on for a famous, but smelly, victory. P.S. Keep your mouth closed when going fast downhill.
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