welcome to the cp training center. it gets sweaty in here. and there will be lots of swearing.
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training: it’s all about PMA
PMA baby, positive mental attitude. ugh, don’t you hate those anacronyms…
Mark definitely does…
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the power problem: what’s with the obsession with watts?
“How did it go?” I asked a young Frenchman when he’d finally retrieved something akin to a normal breath after the 7.2kilometer individual time trial at the recent Tour of Friendship race in Thailand.
“Ah, putain!” he exclaimed, working his facial muscles into a look of disgust and wrangling a soggy baguette out of his back pocket. “My SRM console screwed up, stopped working, so I didn’t know how hard to go…”
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knowing when to stop & the 63km climb
as a firm believer in listening to my body and heeding the signs that the little grey lump encased within my skull transmits to, er, itself, i took the decision not to take part in Taiwan’s second biggest race of the season (the first being the UCI Tour de Taiwan), the AMD 2 Day Huadong race.
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over 40 and interested in cycling? ah, you’d best give up…
just joking… in fact, you best get cranking…
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staying safe & well on the bike
racing hurts. i mean, it really hurts, in so many ways that i’ve always wondered how Dante missed it out when he constructed his Nine Circles of Hell, for surely road racing deserves to be in there, somewhere between Heresy and Violence, being kissed by your auntie and eating Marmite.
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the early season palava
it certainly wasn’t a perfect winter of preparation for your friendly neighbourhood crankpunk. in fact, it was little short of a disaster. a trapped nerve between the 4th and 5th vertebrae destroyed all end of year racing and early winter training from mid-October to the end of November, and then a young speedboy in daddy’s Lexus almost destroyed my good self, trying to sneak a left turn into oncoming traffic – which happened to be me, on a scooter, hurtling happily (til impact that is) along.
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base training with Omega Pharma – QuickStep
interesting little video made for the OPQS team, which details some of the guys’ winter training methods…
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time trialing
crankpunk loves time trialing and being in a two or three man break, loves the burn in the thighs and the constant, steady beat of the pedals. i actually dislike riding on the flat though, for one reason – i find it mind-numbing – it just so happens that this is the terrain that suits my abilities best. 78kg when fighting fit, i’m not exactly built for the hills and haven’t got a sprint to speak of, truth be told. tactics also aren’t my strong point – i’m more of a diesel and happiest when racing anything between 5 and 40km against the clock.
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training: Philippe Gilbert & the Luddite Way
Lud·dite (l
d
t)
n.
getting off the plateau
another rain filled day here in crankland has your friendly neighborhood crankpunk feeling a little stuck in a bubble, for it’s been four days straight now with this moiny little drizzle dampening the streets. it has though provided the inspiration for today’s training article, which is about being stuck on a plateau – not literally of course, cos that might actually be quite pleasant, hunkered down on flat, elevated land with vistas of wooded lower valleys and glistening, snow-capped peaks with a good cup o’ joe and a can-can girl you’ve rescued from the infidels.
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LSD vs. High Intensity Training – a viable shortcut?
crankpunk learned early on, as a fresh-faced (some would say angelic) 15 year old, that if you ask 10 different cyclists a question about training you’ll get about 14 different answers. as a beginner or even intermediate cyclist – and indeed, in some cases, even for pro riders – the sheer volume of different training regimes and routines out there can seem overwhelming. one good performance will have us swearing by our training schedule, yet a bad one the next week will just have us swearing. some will tell you to ride 500km a week, others 200, or to climb 38 flights of stairs on a Monday, whilst some swear by gym work and others say it’s a hindrance.
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the misplaced belief in the 1 minute interval & the concept of The
Unified Approach
intervals. the dreaded intervals. truth be told, interval training is just about the best thing you can do to get ready for racing, to improve power, speed, strength and recovery. but, as ever, it comes down to knowing what kind of intervals to do and when. the real key to cracking the ‘interval code’ – to discovering what model works best for you, is to look at your recent and upcoming races, and to break down the efforts required into an ‘interval code’.
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