There are times even as a fairly slow sportive cyclist that training seems to take up all available time and energy and I find myself asking why bother? And yet I rarely actually train for more than six or seven hours a week, so that should leave plenty of free time available?
The problem for me is those few hours a week take up most of my available energy, so apart from cycling I find myself either resting for the next training ride or doing the minimal that has to be done without much enthusiasm.
And its not like this training allows me to set any records, its enough to get me around but I still struggle on the climbs and suffer on the flat trying to keep up with fast moving groups
So when I saw an ad for The Time Crunched Cyclist by Lance Armstrong’s coach Chris Carmichael that promised to get you Fit, Fast and Powerful on 6 Hours a Week I went out and bought it. This book is an interesting insight into the minds of people who are more dedicated to their sport than I am, but it may not be the recipe for my success.
What Carmichael proposes is an intense 11 week regime of intervals that will get the cyclist fit and give three or four weeks of sustained performance. However, there are caveats as the nature of the program is geared to criteriums and racing rather than endurance and has a three-hour limit for best performance before dropping off, something that is not really enough for riding sportives.
The book does have training programs for Century riders, the difference being in the interval intensity with the century program concentrating on developing sustainable power at lactate threshold while the racing program concentrates on repeatable efforts at V02 max.
The advise for longer events is to start off slower and then race for the last three hours, this is sensible in my case as starting off fast usually results in suffering towards the end.
