oxfordsportive

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.

The unwelcome conclusion from my point of view is that to gain endurance fitness you need to train more than six or so hours a week, Chris Carmichael mentions 10 hours plus per week. This does reinforce what Dr Gary Palmer from Sportstest advised as a training plan which was based on about 10 hours per week.

The good news is that Carmichael does say that training at higher intensities does not switch off the fat burning mechanism, you continue to burn the same amounts of each fuel (carbohydrates, fat, protein) as you do at lower intensities, it’s just that above a certain level you burn large amounts of carbohydrates.

The Endurance String Theory

The theory is that your body is always producing energy through all possible pathways, so all energy systems are like segments of a piece of string, if you pull at the end of the piece of string you drag the segments lower down along as well. So when doing a V02 max effort your body is still busily burning fat while of course also consuming large amounts of carbohydrates.