I think the views on training are changing. There is always going to be the old school that think unless you are out all winter doing long Z1/Z2 rides in all weathers and not doing any intensity until spring you’re not training. However, I think there’s a more forward group of athletes that are challenging that mode of thinking.
Granted, if you are going to be doing 20+ hours per week you won’t be able to maintain intensity for all those hours and a huge chunk of it is going to need to be long, steady endurance work. But, for an amateur that can only train 5-7hrs a week then where are the benefits of those low intesity rides? I’m excited by the attitudes to training changing, and excited by the new kind of riders it will allow to develop.
I agree, most of the hard outside rides I do during the week at less than 25 miles, around a hour, and nobody talks about how many miles are done, sure everybody does a longer ride at the weekend, but that’s more down more time available.
I think a lot of the miles culture comes for the uneducated comes from them talking about cycling “outsiders” the first thing a work college \ family will ask us how many miles you did, got into a argument with somebody I work with as they asked “how many miles do you do a week”, my “I don’t know” didn’t go down very well, and they thought I was being off. It’s also the Strava training metric, have you reached your week’s goal
This reminds me a little of the the Lance Armstrong 90 cadence, that for a while was thought to be why he climbed so well … so everybody “had” to do it, VDP might be doing something different, lets all do that, ignoring all the other people who have won races this year
Would be interesting to get an analysis on why Sagan is performing so badly this spring.
Did he try something new this winter and it backfired on him or did his training remain pretty much the same and the problem is with something else.
Based on the news: Sagan separated or got a divorce from his wife. They have a child. He was also sick for a bit earlier in the season. He was targeting a later peak aka his first attempt at Liege Bastogne Liege, which meant starting his Classics campaign later than usual. I think he skipped Tirreno.
So he has a few wins less this time of year than last year, but he still got 4th at San-Remo and 5th at Roubaix. If his name was anything other than Sagan, this would count as a great season so far. Anyway, it’s still early, way to early to count him out or washed up.
No. Quite to the contrary, his coach reacted quite dismissive in interviews when asked for the training.
All we know is winter training camps in Spain to get in volume.
Altitude training in Livignio with lots of climbing. Actually moto pacing up some mountains. We can assume these are typical SST climbing efforts we see with other pros as well.
In all honesty I haven’t followed all the news regarding Sagan so I am not sure if I am really doubting them.
My comment was more in the spirit that perhaps we could learn more from Sagan’s prep (things to avoid), than from van der Poel as he’s usually pretty strong and now doesn’t seem to be so.
But that might have been a wrong example due to reasons @KickrLin highlighted earlier
That’s only part of the story though…the bigger picture is that he is carrying over his otherworldly dominance from cross. There’s something different about him.
He routinely rode away from the field and essentially won cross races in the FIRST LAP. I watched a bunch of his cross races. He looked like a man amongst boys, and it didnt even seem like he was breaking a sweat.
I brought this up because we know he trains for cyclocross and mountain bike. 1-2 hour races at threshold and above. Loads of sprints. I believe that has been his focus for the last few years but I could be wrong. I don’t follow racing all that close. I’ve listened to a few podcasts lately saying that you can’t train your aerobic and anaerobic systems simultaneously. Both take a lot of time to develop, years. No doubt he spends a load of time in the saddle and has a massive aerobic engine but it also seems that his anaerobic engine is massive as well. His anaerobic system gets tested every race in both mountain and cross races. I’m wondering if this focus on his anaerobic system is what has brought him the results on the road this season. I want to see him in a time trial.
While true, at some point if you want to ride faster, you need to ride faster. There are a lot of average joes out there spending an awful lot of time in the saddle on one epic weekend ride, then noodling through weekday rides without enough structure and intensity… They simply won’t ever realize their potential because they’re not riding with enough intensity when they need to, and too much when they don’t.
You can have a high VO2max and High anaerobic capacity, but what that does is limits your threshold sustainable power. i.e. it’s a lower percent of his max than someone who has a moderate anaerobic capacity. So someone with the same max as him, but lower AC, will probably have a higher threshold.
Don’t forget that this guys gene pool contains phenomenal cyclists. He’s likely been riding bikes since he could walk, and fast. He lives in a nation where cycling is in their blood. And presumably he’s had inside knowledge and equipment from a very young age, thanks to his father being who he was. So you’d imagine he’d be a talent and so he proved at the AGR.
I’m fairly sure that I read a number of years ago about Team Sky’s Tim Kerrison advocating High Intensity / high power efforts during winter and building endurance after that. Which maybe has parallels with the very sprint-heavy nature of CX races throughout winter. Less so I imagine as racing usually always lures you deeper that any training can. Not sure any MvdP does to train is different. He’s the difference.
Agreed. But as has been beaten to death around here, most of us “average Joes” don’t have enough time to dedicate to the long, slow, easy riding to make polarized training worthwhile for us. Chad and Nate repeat that TR aims to provide quality training to athletes for whom training time is a limiter, and thus intensity becomes paramount over duration.
I don’t know how good MVDP is at TT’S, but his long time cross rival Wout van Aert is a strong time trialist. Last year he won the TT in the Tour of Denmark (and won the race), beating a fairly strong field.
