Photo: SnowyMountain Photography
Part I: Over-training vs Rest
2019 was my best season to date. I don’t want to bore you with the details, so here is a quick look at the numbers:
- 50 races
- 2 wins
- 20 Top 10s
- 32 teammate Top 5s – that’s nearly two-thirds of all the racing I did in 2019. And I wasn’t even there – thanks to my knee – for the second half of Intelligentsia Cup.
Thanks to roadresults.com for the data. They also let me know that I only beat Sam Boardman once in a race in 2019, but he beat me sixteen times… AND he’s a nice guy too so I can’t even be mad.
The better of my two wins came on Stage 3 of the Tucson Bicycle Classic. While still a notch below Redlands and Gila, TBC is still a pretty big race, and taking the win out of a small breakaway group gave me a huge boost of confidence at the beginning of the 2019 season.
My team, Project Echelon Racing, had another stellar year in 2019, with victories at Joe Martin and Intelligentsia Cup, a couple of Top 10s at the US Pro National Championships, and 57 podiums in total. As for me, I was a part of the stage race squad for most of the year targeting 3 to 5-day events such as Redlands, Joe Martin, and Gila. While I was able to score some decent results, I also made a number of mistakes throughout the year, some of which that I am still struggling to right.
From training to race weight, to time trials and peak performances, this is Part I of what I learned from the 2019 road season:
(Over) training:
I like to train hard. I hate riding easy – a Zone 1 ride is the death of me. I’d rather just take the day off.
I want to suffer day in and day out, because it makes me feel like I am getting stronger – this has caught up with me on a few occasions, but that’s another point in and of itself…
I started serious training for the 2019 road season in November of 2018. It was about four months until our first real race of the season – Valley of the Sun Stage Race – and five months until our first “A” race of the season: Redlands Bicycle Classic. I wanted to come into the season fit but not flying, on form but not the peak kind. So I started training early, and in hindsight, my timing was actually OK.
But, I went too hard too early. The volume of my training was on point, about 15-17 hrs/week in November and December 2018, and building to 18-20+ hours by January 2019. This would have be completely fine, if only I could have refrained from doing threshold intervals…
I started dabbling with threshold (Zone 4) intervals in late November 2018, standard ladders on the trainer with adding up to 20-30 minutes total of Z4 work. While this may work for some people, but in hindsight, it may have been too much for me.
Even worse was the fact that I was doing threshold efforts on Mount Lemmon in my first week of training in Tucson. It was early January and my teammate and I had just spent the last 30+ hours in the team van. Yet, with all things considered, the training worked. If my goal was to peak in March, then I certainly achieved that. I came into the season on stellar form, and was setting power PRs on Mount Lemmon every other week. However, I refused to take a break after Redlands, where my power PRs meant nothing because I crashed on the Queen stage, got myself dropped and injured, and struggled enough just to finish the damn thing.
I should have taken a break, but instead, I jumped right back into training, doing threshold ladders on the trainer, and then racing again 10 days later at San Dimas. My body wasn’t healed, I was pushing the edge of burnout, and the season had barely started.
Two Days of Rest is the Magic Number:
I’m not a complete idiot – despite the recent number of paragraphs where I described how I continually dug my own shallow grave at the start of the season – and I did do a number of things right in 2019. One was following a two-day rest pattern. It took me a while to figure this out, and I didn’t always apply it consistently, but now that I know it’s there, perhaps I’ll be smart enough to apply it again in the future.
As I skimmed through my 2019 road season, I noticed a pattern emerging: every time I took two days of rest (e.g. One day off followed by one day easy, or vice versa), I always felt amazing the next day. With my ‘kill or be killed’ mentality, two days of rest has always felt like waving the white flag. I want to always be training harder, riding longer, suffering more…because that’s what separates the good from the great (or so I thought).
But time and time again, I would dig myself into a hole of overtraining, only to have my dad/coach pull me back out by prescribing two consecutive days of rest. I never wanted to do it, but as the season wore on, I could feel myself needing it. Let me give you some examples:
- January
training block: took a day off, then rode 90 min easy the day before
beginning a 5-day training block
- I felt amazing for all five days of the block and was hitting numbers I’d never seen before in training.
- 30 min
power test in February: rode 2 hours Z2,
then 75 min Z1the day before the
test
- I did 4×15 min Z3 intervals in the same ride, and then still set a 30 min Power PR by over 15 W
- Group
ride in February: rode 75 min Z1, then took a day off before the group ride
- I thought I was way too under-cooked – because group rides in February in Tucson are as hard as any race, and I never take the day off before a race! I always do openers the day before… I ended up dominating the group ride, riding all but two guys off my wheel and setting multiple Power PRs in the process
At least once in 2020, I want to try racing after a day completely off the bike, instead of after the standard one-hour ride with openers
- Between
Team Camp and Valley of the Sun: coming off a big week of riding with the
team, we had just two days between camp and Valley of the Sun, with the first
stage being a ~30 min time trial. For the two days in between, I rode 2 hours
Z2, and then 75 min Z1 with openers
- I felt amazing for all three days of racing, and set a TT bike Power PR in Stage 1
***
Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ve learned as much as I have from reviewing my 2019 season. I encourage you to go back through your training files – your TrainingPeaks, Strava, diary, wherever you keep notes – and see what you did wrong (and also what you did right) in 2019. You can miss a lot of important lessons in the moment, when emotions and chaos are running at an all-time high. Try to take an objective view when examining your files and notes, and I guarantee you will learn something about yourself.