12 Weeks to go to the 94.7 Cycle Challenge – How ready are you?

12 Weeks to go to the 94.7 Cycle Challenge – How ready are you?

On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast we have our cycling coach Devlin Eyden giving us direction and tips on where we should be in our training.  Coming out of winter with not much training having taken place and only 12 weeks to go, we see what we should be focusing on now to get ready for the Telkom 94.7 Cycle Challenge.

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Transcript

David Katz: This is the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast, thanks for joining myself, Mr Active, David Katz and Devlin Eyden and it’s a big time of year in South Africa in cycling circles. Especially if you’re a road cyclist because we are just under 3 months to go to the Telkom 94.7 Cycle Challenge and with that in mind, Devlin, there was a question saying, what should you be doing at this stage? Obviously we’ve come out of winter, some guys don’t cycle through, some do, but with 3 months to go, what should you be looking at doing?

Cycling through winter will be to your advantage

Devlin Eyden: By this stage hopefully you’ve got some sort of training that has been happening throughout winter and I know it is quite difficult, but with three months to go, technically, roughly 12 weeks, by now there should be a fair amount of intensity that’s being built into the program. With 12 weeks out we would typically still be working in a little bit of a strength and power phase going forward. I think to break the week up a little bit, I would typically do one or two long rides. When I say long, 2+ hours, just for some time in the saddle, which is something that I hope has been happening for most of the riders throughout winter, is some sort of easy base training.

The good thing as well, there seems to be so many races on the race calendar throughout the year, so I am hoping that a fair amount of the listeners will have had some sort of training that has been happening over the last couple of months.

I’m also a big advocate of adding cross training into the program, for two reasons. When I refer to cross training, I’m talking either swimming or running as well and the reason there, it just takes the monotony out of cycling, you’re doing something different that keeps the mind active and keeps the mind fresh and then at the same time, it’s working different muscles.

Swimming for instance, you can get a decent workout in without really hammering the legs and working too hard and tiring the legs out, so just something a little bit different as cross training.

Increasing your strength and power intervals  cycling training

There needs to be, as I mentioned, some of the longer distance, even base kind of ride, if you’d like to call it that, and then when we start talking about the strength work, there needs to be levels of strength and Power intervals. High intensity intervals, it’s two types of interval sessions that can happen in the week. One being the slightly longer intervals of typically 5 minutes, 10 minutes, that sort of thing and then other intervals where we’re working more on that really high intensity, so typically like a two minute interval or a one minute interval, but at a much higher intensity, with a fair amount of hill training as well. Some of those rides can have some rolling hills in the route.

Key as well in the whole week, as much as we’d like to try and hammer back to the training and especially when we’re coming out of winter now, that we feel like we need to play catch-up, it is important to still get one, a recovery ride in, anything between a half an hour to an hours recovery ride and then also still the rest days. Making sure we’re still taking a day off and recovering. On that day, implementing recovery strategies, depending on what works for people, so things like an ice bath, massages, lots of stretching and trying to get as much sleep at the same time. Recovery is quite key there, but there needs to be a mixture. Three months out now, I think key is to be having a fair amount of intensity building and get some of the strength into the program.

In saying that as well, spending time on the bike, start riding in groups again, getting comfortable again with working with other athletes around you, just so that you are building that confidence going forward as well.

DK: There you have it, some sound advice with three months to go to the Telkom 94.7 Cycle Challenge, we’ll keep you updated and give you some more info in the lead-up to the event but also if you have some questions, do send them through to us here on the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast but from Devlin Eyden and myself, Mr Active, David Katz, we’ll catch up with you again on the next edition.

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