Train Your Weaknesses: Prepare for the Fat Tire Season

If you want to be strong and smiling at the finish line with a medal around your neck, it starts now.After week upon week of chilly commutes to the office and watching the wind gusts and occasional snow flurries outside my window in Colorado, it’s often hard to imagine the singletrack bliss of the summer mountain biking season. However, the sun is making more frequent appearances lately, and the days are slowly but surely stretching themselves out. It's time to start preparing for the mountain biking season ahead.

The important thing is to set yourself up for a great year of trail riding with proactivity. Whether your goal is audacious like tackling an ultra 50- or 100-miler, a podium in the state cross-country series, or just hammering your buddies (or nemeses?) around the local singletrack; to succeed requires a plan and putting in some good work.

As the topic of goal setting is well-covered, I’m pointing you straight to action. There’s a quote that I love by Anthony Robbins and it sets the premise for this article. “If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." Is that the way you want the coming season to play out, the same old same old?

I want you to think two-fold: your strengths and weaknesses from the previous year. Take a second to bask in your successes and accomplishments, but then really deliberate the weaknesses and failures. I’m not a pessimist, but the latter is what you should learn from. As a rider you’ll always flex your strengths and style during the "go time" situations, so working on your weaker points is imperative.

One of the best ways to do is by using the Charts in your TrainingPeaks Dashboard to see how you “stack up” against yourself.  Yes yourself, because if you work NOW on improving intrinsically then you will extrinsically show your abilities in due time. Here are three charts within TrainingPeaks that can be used to observe trends in your cycling training.

Power Profile Chart

First I love using the Power Profile Chart. Basically as long as you’ve tracked your body weight changes periodically and you have power data, then this chart can tell you where you may have weaknesses. There are a couple caveats; the chart is only as good as the data you’ve compiled and there are no age-adjusted norms for the Categories on the chart. So if you see a low column, think critically about whether you missed collecting some cycling power data on the road, or if you're missing data from mountain bike rides where you don’t have power data. My suggestion to you is to assess the general trend of the chart and and work on improving the columns as much as you can. And have intent when you select the correct time frame in the Dashboard, because there’s a huge difference between the last 7 days, last 28 days, and last 180 days.

Here' an example of a Power Profile Chart of a Master’s athlete that competes in shorter events.

This athlete would could improve his power at VO2Max or 1-3 min power to handle the surges that normally create separation in the races. I wouldn’t be so concerned with the lower 5-sec power bin because, as the athlete did not have a mountain biking power meter, that data was not collected. And if you can handle the surges early on, you won’t ever need to unleash a sprint...just saying!

If I see this weakness in athletes I coach, I usually prescribe power intervals in 1-4min intervals with equal recovery, with the goal to accumulate 10-20 minutes of intensity within one workout. These types of efforts can be done without HR monitors or power meters because the goal is simply to go full tilt and consume a lot of oxygen during the interval! I'd suggest something like 7x2 min all out intervals at an elevated RPM, with 2 min of very easy recovery spinning in between.

Remember, a single workout like this is all part of a big picture plan, so make sure to use it appropriately and according to your current ability.

Time in Power/HR Zones Chart

Another way to see if you’ve worked on an energy system enough is with the Time in Power Zones or Time in HR Zones Chart.

In the example above, would this athlete see benefit from threshold or high-end VO2 max work? I’d say less VO2 max development and more focus on threshold power, sweet spot or tempo training so that they have sustainable power longer than 2-3min, and can handle the long grinds.

There are several variations of workouts to improve your sustainable (functional threshold) power, but I like to keep it simple with something like 3x10 min or up to 4x15 min efforts close to threshold with approximately a 2:1 work-to-rest ratio. Usually accumulating 30-60 minutes of time at that intensity within a single workout is ideal. Be open-minded with this type of workout as well - it could fit nicely into an existing ride. For example, if you ride a trail that has a 15 min climb and then some rest followed by a series of 5-8 min climbs, you can use those segments to pin-in at race pace and get the work done without doing repeats!

Kilojoules per Week Chart

You can use the Kilojoules per Week Chart to critique if you did enough work before the season hit, built in enough rest after your big training or racing, and if the work you did was generally enough or too little for the goal events you tackled.  

In the example above, you can see that every 3-4 weeks there is a reduced workload to allow recovery, and there is a strategic break in July after two big goals n April and June have passed. So if you did 3000 kJ/wk in January last year, then aim to increase that kJ expenditure by 10% per week this year with lower work weeks every 2-4 weeks. For example, an 8 week block goal may look like this: 3000kJ, 3300kJ, 3630kJ, 2200kJ, 4000kJ, 4400kJ, 4830kJ, 2500kJ.

Now that you have identified unique areas that are critical for acheiving your goals...off you go! Hopefully these terms from the TrainingPeaks charts may ring a bell in your head, but if not, I invite you to follow along with me while I progress through the season from the perspective of a professional mountain biker, a full-time endurance coach, and a bit of an athletically sporadic person in general.

Do you want access to the charts and analysis tools that Daniel described in this piece? Check out TrainingPeaks software for athletes, where you can upload your power, heart rate, and other training data for summary and analysis over time. 

Daniel Matheny is a Senior Coach with Carmichael Training Systems. He is located in Colorado Springs, CO and has been racing Professional since 2003, while also racing Elite Cyclocross, Category 2 Road, and Category 1 Gravity MTB. Daniel currently races with the HoneyStinger Professional MTB team and is the current 24 Hour Mountain Bike National Champion, a 2x Leadville 100 “Big Buckle” finisher, a former Leadville Silver Rush 50 winner, and the current 2011 Breckenridge 68 winner. He can also be found racing on the road with the BCV/Team Scion amateur road cycling team with recent top 10 General Classification placement in the 2011 Vuelta Mallorca UCI International Stage Race. Connect with Daniel via Twitter @danielmatheny, dmatheny@trainright.com, or his blog. For information on coaching, training camps, and performance testing, visit www.trainright.com.