How much CX fitness can you build in a month

Racing
1

58yo mid pack age group cat3 CXer. Regular but not particularly serious rider for last 10 years. Have not done very much structured training in last couple years, mostly do several recreational MTB rides 60-90 min in length per week, and am usually yo-yoing with my weight between 210-240 lbs (currently 215). A couple weeks into the CX season I find myself in surprisingly decent shape, not that far off the front of the pack, so thinking about doing 6 weeks with a couple days of structured training to see if I can get myself competitive by end of season.

My strengths are starts, technical features/bike handling, and high torque accelerations (ie, coming out of turns, punching up short hills). Probably typical mtb profile. Weaknesses are long straightaways and long hills, anything with pavement (I regularly get dropped by the roadie crew, and have to make up ground when they hit turns/tech features). Can hang with front of pack for a couple laps, but tend to drift off pace after that, so stamina an issue. Would love to narrow lap time drop-off over course of race.

With that in mind, what sort of workouts are worth focus on that give best bang for the buck? Plan to do 2-4 races a weekend, one or two mtb rides and then a cx skills practice a week, so limited to max 2 structured trainer rides a week. Trainnow not particularly helpful, as it is constantly telling me my training stress is too high take a break.

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This sounds like me. My last CX race I was getting caught on a 90 second ‘climb’ back, but would drop those that caught me once the course went back to the tight turns, sketchy descents etc. I was able to finally gap them on the second to last lap.

I’m not racing as much as you - just once a weekend, though I should take the advantage to double up since it’s only $15 to race a second race - but I’m doing two ‘structured’ days which are basically a day of threshold of like 30/40 mins (either 4x10s or 3x10/12s on a course I have at the local park) and a day of 30/30s. Everything else is z2 or easy endurance.

3

I’m not a coach, but you are telling us that your short power and repeatability is great, but you get dropped at threshold. That would mean you could need some sweetspot and threshold work during the week.

What you are describing as your strengths is also what exhaust you, so you could try to minimize these type of efforts as much as you can. Better placement before the turns and hills, slowing less in the turns… if it’s possible.

You have an anaerobic capacity/reserve to make efforts above threshold. All efforts above threshold will reduce it. You need to be under threshold to recover and refill it. So, try to use it sparingly, and raise your threshold to refill it faster.

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