Here is a suggestion for an interval training session. Three reps of eight minutes at threshold power plus about eight percent, with good recovery in between, like ten or fifteen minutes. Depending a little on your physiology, the eight percent might be a bit ambitious or a little too easy. But don’t worry, the main aim is simply to do them as hard as you can while still able to complete the last one without seeing a long tunnel leading towards a brilliant light and hearing angels singing.
It’s an excellent session, and I’ve been planning to do it for ages. Since the spring of 2009, to be exact. For some reason, I can’t do it. Many, many times I have put it in the schedule with some vague note about VO2 max improvement, and exactly as many times I’ve somehow managed to let the session get bumped by something else, or mysteriously found my day so full of work commitments that I can’t train at all, or I’ve done the warm up and decided that maybe I’m getting a cold or that actually I’m going to give up cycling.
I haven’t done it once. It is my personal experience that medium length intervals are impossible. There are other things in my life that are the same – there is a difficult email I’ve been trying to write for so long that the draft has been on three different laptops.
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On the other hand there are sessions I’m always happy to do, despite their difficulty. I’m always up for a heat-conditioning session, never mind the fact that there is no respect in which they are easier to deal with than the medium interval session. And I’ll do short intervals any day, even sessions with very short recovery breaks (let’s say 40-second efforts with 20-second recoveries) that mean by the time I’m finished my pulse has been at its maximum for ten minutes and I’m so hot and over-stimulated I won’t be able to sleep for two days.
Multiple national champion, best selling author, coach and aero expert, Dr Hutch writes for Cycling Weekly every week.
Other people have blind spots too. A teammate used to have an aversion to short interval sessions that ran so deep it led to a conversation with the coach that went like this:
Coach: “How was the session?”
Rider: “It was fine.”Coach: “How long did you leave between the two sets?”
Rider: “Four months. So far.”
My friend Bernard, whose wisdom will be known to regular readers, also has a blind spot – his is for training. He’ll do anything; long rides, hard rides, rides where you sprint for every village sign, just as long as it’s not “training”. The instant you try to formalise what you’re doing he freezes up.
“Neuro-muscular efficiency? What did you want to mention that for? We’re just out for a social ride!”
“Mate, we are doing a five-second max-effort, high cadence sprint every two minutes while we ride between two roundabouts on a crematorium access road.”
“I know, and up till now I was enjoying it.”
Riders I’ve coached often have a pattern of making excuses to avoid particular things, often swapping in something else that they like better. It probably doesn’t make a huge difference from a performance point of view – there’s usually more than one way to produce the training stimulus you’re aiming for.
But there can sometimes be something to be said for encouraging riders do things they don’t like. Why? Well, it might do something for their resilience – doing things you don’t like can be a positive when a race gets difficult. It can produce a sense of achievement, or help a rider believe that they’ve got more commitment than they thought they had.
Also, if you’re the coach, it can be a good way to spoil the Saturday afternoons of clients you don’t like very much. Not that I’d ever do that, obviously.
How To… take your bike indoors
Many people, oddly, believe that bikes belong outside, like horses and trees. People who think this include receptionists, hotel staff, office managers, landlords, university accommodation officers, and spouses.
In general, the best approach is never to ask. As in so many aspects of life, asking permission is an invitation to someone to say no. Often the most effective tactic is simply to walk in with the bike. If you carry it so it’s not touching the ground, many people won’t really register that it’s a bike at all.
If they challenge you, say, “I’m just bringing it inside.” It’s astonishing how often this works. If this doesn’t work, you might have to negotiate – try telling them it’s valuable, that it’s very clean (I don’t like to imagine any readers have a dirty bike), and that you’ll be very careful.
Don’t tell them it’s your emotional support bicycle. They’ve heard this joke before and are getting annoyed about it.
Folding bikes are easier, partly because they’re smaller, but mainly because they always have an unthreatening air of comedy about them. They’re also easy to hide – you can put one in a shopping bag.
All of this is mainly relevant to institutional settings. At home, sadly, you’re going to have to a) participate in a debate on the subject and b) accept defeat gracefully.
(Image credit: Future)
Dear Doc ….
I don’t use a power meter on the road, but I use my smart-trainer to do interval workouts. A few months ago, mid-session, my 13-year-old daughter snatched the iPad off the stand in front of me so I couldn’t see it, and started shouting the wattage numbers and the time to go.
She started doing this every session. It’s the only time she’s ever taken the slightest interest in sport of any kind, so I was, in a weird way, quite pleased.
Only months later when I actually checked some post-session data did I discover that she’s been making the intervals longer and longer, and under-reporting the wattages. I’ve been depressed about my fitness all season, except now I discover it was in fact my best ever.
I have no idea what to do to my daughter. I literally don’t know whether to take her phone away or give her a new one.
Anon.
