Mid-Season Plateau Buster

Here you are, three months into a four month racing season, and you feel like you’ve lost your mojo. All of a sudden your motivation is fading, your legs feel dull, and you’re wondering how to bust out of a rut. What do you do? Most athletes’ instinct is just to push through and keep up more of the same, which is rarely the answer. In order to best help you and the rest of your race season, here are a few tips to get you back to feeling sparky!

1. Take a little extra rest. Racing and training can be stressful, and if you’ve been doing a lot of it, your dullness could be a result of just flat being a bit too tired. Take 3-5 days and decrease your workload by at least 20% and REALLY focus on your recovery. No staying up late, no booze, lots of water and good healthy food.

2. Take stock. Once you’ve taken a little rest, look back at your last month of training objectively. If you have a heart rate monitor, or a power meter, go back and look at your time in your training zones. Have you been spending a lot of time at medium intensities? If you don’t really monitor intensity, and do long races, you probably spend 90% of your training time at one medium intensity. If your races are less than 90 minutes, and you spend a lot of time doing intervals, you’re probably spending a very significant amount of time at a high intensity and not enough at low and medium intensities.

3. Mix it up. If you’ve been spending a lot of time in mid-range intensities, throw in some very high intensity intervals and some long easy rides. If you’ve been doing a lot of very high intensity, throw in some easy, and moderate intensities. By mixing up the stimulus, your body will be surprised into adapting again and getting back into the good groove. As a note of caution though, if you’re jumping up the intensity, you need to also increase the recovery between workouts!

4. Learn from this. This midseason slump does not have to happen! It actually means some things haven’t quite gone right. So plan to avoid it happening in the future. Whether it’s another block of racing, or planning next season, include enough rest to account for the added stress of racing, monitor and record your training intensity, and mix in varied intensities from the start.

If you can keep these four steps in mind, you’ll go a long way to bust out of this season’s rut and make next year’s race season even more productive!

Camp War Pony Day Six: Winter is Here.

Last night I got off work and drove south. Drove up to about 11,000 feet and parked the War Pony on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It was snowing HARD. The roads were terrible, a mix of snow, slush, and ice. But I couldn't have been more excited. This was going to be a fairly significant test of all systems, and I was going to wake up in the snow. 

Woke up to four new inches of snow. Enough to cover up all my tracks of driving into the spot. It got down to 19 degrees. I left one of my bottles outside of my "cooler" (which I use to keep things warm) just for curiosity's sake. Below is the picture of the frozen water. 

Even at 19 degrees, I was toasty warm in my bag. I woke up sweating once and had to unzip the bag a little. Today I'm going to finish my propane heater set-up. Yesterday the woman at the propane store built me most of an awesome little custom mount/valve for my heater. I'll show the finished product and chat about it tomorrow, along with a review of how it works in tonights predicted single digits. 

This was the first night that felt like true freedom. Before this, I'd been parking fairly close to town in "safe" places. Last night was real, and I couldn't have enjoyed it more.