Bicycling 101: Spring Training
by Liz Sands, TCBC Ride Leader
You might be looking at the title of this article and thinking, “Training!?!
I ride my bike for fun.” Nevertheless, there are some things you can
do this spring that will help ensure that your summer riding will be
fun. After all, it’s fun to start the season uninjured and in good enough
shape to keep up with your riding buddies, right? Here are some tips
that I garnered from our members.
Even if you don’t ride outdoors during the winter, do what you can
to maintain your fitness. Spinning classes, or riding your bike on a
stationary trainer, are most specific to riding your bike. But any kind
of exercise that maintains cardiovascular fitness is also good: cross-country
skiing, swimming, running, rollerblading at the Metrodome, to name a
few.
Once you start riding outdoors, don’t do any hard rides until you’ve
built a base, at least 500 miles. Wear a heart rate monitor and know
how to use it. Try to ride in your endurance zone (that means an easy
pace) for your base training. If you don’t have a heart rate monitor,
use the talk test. If you can carry on a conversation with the person
you’re riding with, you’re going at a nice easy pace. If you can only
choke out fragments of sentences, pausing for breath in between, you’re
probably starting to work pretty hard and should not stay at that level
of effort very long. (On the other hand, if you can sing your favorite
opera aria, you’re probably not working quite hard enough!)
When the weather is cold in the spring (say, less than 50 degrees),
spend twice as much time warming up (by riding slower in much lower
gears) before increasing your speed. For example, if you would normally
spend 15-20 minutes warming up, instead spend half an hour warming up.
This helps prevent injury to ligaments and joints, which are more sensitive
in the cold temperatures.
Remember that even you may not feel thirsty riding in cool weather,
you still need to stay hydrated. And, on rides longer than an hour or
so, a sport drink can be helpful to provide calories and electrolytes.
Monitor the elapsed time on your bike computer to make sure you’re drinking
a couple swallows of water at least every 15 minutes.
If you have a goal – like riding the 100-mile route at the IRONMAN
– do one long ride a week and gradually increase the length. Obviously,
this is in addition to doing at least a couple of shorter rides each
week, whether outdoors or on your stationary trainer. Even if you have
your 500-mile base in, be sure to do longer rides at an easy pace. That
might mean swallowing your pride and letting the riders who have been
riding all winter ride away from you on the first hill! Check our ride
schedule for weekend training rides during the four weeks leading up
to the IRONMAN.
Some members keep a training log, which they find very useful for gauging
progress during a season as well as for comparison to the same time
last year. You can buy a special log book just for that purpose from
publications like VeloNews or Bicycling, or just get a small notebook
and record whatever interests you. Some examples: elapsed time, distance,
average speed, weather & wind conditions, route, riding companions,
comments about how you felt during the ride, etc. If you use a heart
rate monitor, you can also record average and/or max heart rate, and
the amount of time in a training zone.
Finally, my favorite strategy - take a spring vacation that is devoted
to bike riding. You can tolerate much longer rides if you have all day
to get a ride done, and nothing to do afterward except lie around and
recover! (It helps if you go somewhere where there just isn’t much to
do except ride your bike). Texas Hell Week is in mid-March every year
and there will be lots of other riders there, including some TCBC members,
who are doing their first long bike rides of the year (www.hellweek.com).
Another option is the Arizona Desert Camps – four different weeks of
riding offered by the Pac Tours organization (go to www.pactour.com
and click on ‘Arizona Desert Training Camp’). By the time you read this
article it might be pretty late to plan either of these, but keep them
in mind for next spring.
Copyright © 2004 Liz Sands. All rights reserved.
(March 2004)
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