I Have Been Asked Multiple Times:
How are you staying sane this winter?
The answer is plain and simple:
Training Indoors with my Power Tap.
It has been a long winter, and the coldest on record in 38 years, maybe more now.
Why is training with power my knight and shining armor?
I am able to concentrate on specific energy systems,
I know that I am training exactly that which I want to train,
and it really makes the time go by fast.
I know it helps that I am a coach and I know exactly how to write, or “choreograph” a workout to get what I want out of my ride.
It’s a great deal.
I have a few athletes who train with power and have been training indoors this winter.
One is seeing improvements in about 4 hours of training per week. His long game may be temporarily suffering, but neither of us are worried about it, because we know we are training everything that needs to be trained to have some smoking races this year.
Another athlete just won the Texas Marathon Mountain Bike State Championship.
Training with power makes this all doable.
It’s very exciting when I train indoors because I train on the rollers and this helps my bike handling skills on the trail immensely.
If it’s a really long workout I may do some time on the trainer to do drills, although I can do more than 3 hours, and have on the rollers, after about 3.5 it can become rather treacherous, I get tired, and super sweaty.
Maybe one day I will be talented enough to do one legged drills on the rollers.
Until then, I have to just dream about it.
I know it can be done because I have seen amazing things on YouTube. 🙂
Concentrating on the ride, the numbers, and my form on the bike has made all of the physical and psychological difference to me in the world these past few months.
Today on my ‘run’ I recognized something that which is very important:
Sometimes it’s good to just slow down.
It’s just too early in the season to get hurt.
I’ve had to go much slower than I wanted on several, most of my adventures, this past winter.
Including today.
Why?
If I wanted to go as fast as I wanted to go, my personal safety would have been put at risk.
It’s too early in the season to get hurt.
Today was no different, I was “running’ in my yaks. We had a huge melt, yesterday it rained and rained and rained, I thought that the snow on the trails would be hard packed. They were sometimes. Other times, I would sink to my knee. The conditions were much less stable then I thought they would be.
So I just pulled in the reigns, enjoyed the 13 degrees wind chill, the scenery, and being outdoors.
It was good work, different work, all in all it was a great training day.
That advice can really go a long way; it’s too early in the season to get hurt, to sprain an ankle, or re-injure my foot.
The time now that we spend training and racing is the foundation of everything that comes during the rest of the year.
And me, I am not planning on screwing that up!
This week has been a great one. I got 4 hours of riding out of doors, YES!!
Got in about 5500 yards,
And covered about 6 miles by foot, excluding all the walks I do with the tail waggers.
I do hope that your week was equally fulfilling.
Thanks for checking in!