This probably isn’t how any of us planned on kicking off a new decade. BWR and other events seem infinitely far away. Group rides are cancelled and in some areas, outside riding is also prohibited. It’s hard! The bike has also never been more important, providing stress relief, exercise, and providing a little sanity, whether you are doing thatinside or outside.
How should you train right now? When everything begins again, you’ll find a compressed season that poses many challenges as an athlete that you’ve never experienced. For us as coaches, this makes for a preparation which is completely new and different and exciting. Source Endurance knows what sort of efforts early and mid-season events require and how they impact late season performance. We can get you to that point with or without events.
Training/riding has positive benefits in terms of immune function, but you are going to want to keep your training – and life! – stress level below the point it begins to make you more susceptible to opportunistic infections. Frankly, this is a pretty good time to have a coach keeping an eye out for you. Our coaches are paying extra close attention to all the little clues that tell us when an athlete is starting to get run a little bit ragged. It’s good to err on the side of caution and clamp down on intensity and work load when those clues start to appear. It wouldn’t hurt to be extra diligent in writing down subjective feedback on your training log, just to make sure that kind of stuff gets factored into your training.
With more time we can relax the periodization models a bit and make them less physically stressful. The reduced stress will leave you stronger overall and able to more effectively resist illness. Leveraging time in this way will result in you being stronger overall while allowing for more rest days.
It’s not a great time to run yourself ragged or take big risks on the bike, but it’s not all darkness and doom. If we’re healthy and able to ride, it’s a great opportunity to get back to the roots of why you started in the first place, make new goals, and emerge a better athlete. Here are some ideas to mix things up:
- Keep things fun (and safe)! Try a new route, ride a different bike, incorporate at home strength training, jogging, or yoga.
- Work with your coach to add variety to your training withindoor apps like Zwift or TrainerRoad. These both have social components as well, which many of us are itching for.
- Dial in weaknesses and optimize other areas of athleticism that could use some attention:nutrition, meal prepping, sleep performance, foam rolling, stretching.
- Check out one or all of these books: The Brave Athlete, On Top of Your Game, How Bad Do You Want it?
- Get your bikes dialed: swap out parts if you need to, declutter your bike area and storage boxes, watch YouTube videos on how to do some of your own bike maintenance, overhaul your bikes as much as you are comfortable with.
