Steel City Endurance Racing

Hey guys, just a few words about training and racing in the spring…

From a fitness point of view, nobody is going to be in top form for
Mingo, that’s pretty clear to everyone. But you can be that the people
that show up to race are not going to plan on “letting” anyone else
win or get away if they have anything to say about it.

Between Mingo, Aliquippa and teh Oval, there are going to be
“training” races weekly and twice weekly for the next 3 months.  For
some people, doing well at the Oval may be your primary racing goal
for the season. For others with tons of experience, it’s just another
workout that falls on a tuesday/wednesday night.

What you need to do is look at the season as a whole and decide what
race, or at what point in the season you want to be racing yoru best.
What type of race is it? What weaknesses will you have to work on to
do well in that race?  How will you improve those weaknesses between
now and then?

One huge mistake I made my first year racing at the oval was trying to
“rest up” for Tuesday nights.  I was hesitant to ride hard on a Sunday
because I wasn’t sure I could recover in time to race hard on Tuesday.
What ended up happening is that I never got in any quality training
time because I was preparing for a “race” every week.

We all want to perform our best for a race.

But performance is a combination of two main factors…fitness and
fatigue.  Peaking is a very easy concept.  You build fitness, and then
shed fatigue in order to arrive at your peak performance on race day.
Naturally that takes practice to get it right, and a bit of trial and
error.  Unless you are a triathlete, there will be MANY, if not most
races in which you must, by design of your training plan, sacrifice
some amount of performance, in order to continue building fitness for
your bigger goals.

Building fitness is done by manipulating a combination of 3 factors in
your training..

-frequency
-intensity
-duration

Shedding fatigue is typically done by cutting volume in the 1-2 weeks
prior to your “A” race while maintaining intensity.

So it should be clear that you cannot peak/taper for a race and build
fitness at the same time.

Regardless of our wide variety of goals this year, we are all still in
fitness building phase of training.  Depending on your fitness level,
you might ride intervals friday night, do 5 hours saturday, get up
early, ride 90 minutes prior to mingo, finish mingo, do a recovery
ride on monday and be ready to start your trainning week again on
Tuesday.

For others, racing Mingo may be a combination of intensity and
duration that will take up a considerable portion of your training
week “budget” of training stress.

Only you know your body best, and how all the Mingo races and
Aliquippa races will fit into your overall training plan for your
season. So show up to race, pick some of the goals that Doug talked
about in his email, and KNOW how Mingo, et al  fits into your training
plan.

-Coach