Most definitely. Like any type of racing aerobic is king. I do think that crossers have an innately higher amount of fast twitch fibers which translates to incredible 10-90s power.
It seems like they probably train very similar to other pros, outside of GT racers. Lots of volume, some racing, build a massive FTP, and then get specific. Kind of what we all should do!
Yep
True. The women seem to have more of a road focus. Look at Brand, Vos, etc. Vos just finished runner up in Roubaix and World Champs. I was just browsing the top male riders and noticed that outside of Hermans, most of them only have around 15 race days this season so far on the road, which I thought was pretty low. Maybe COVID related? Or perhaps ProCyclingStats isn’t showing the local, smaller events they are doing.
Yeah - I don’t think that PCS does anything that is an “National” level event (as opposed to a UCI / International event).
I had a quick look at Toon Aerts, PCS has him racing from the end of May to early September on the road, with two 5 day stage races, Tour of Belgium and Tour of Wallonie. He was racing CX until the end of Feb this year. Give a month for R&R, 2 months of base and back at it by the very end of May. Those 2x 5 days stage races are probably top quality fitnesses, so I guess they were no accident.
I think some of it is that there is big money to be made in CX - so specialising in it is not a bad way to make a living. Also the CX teams are pretty locally focused - they’re big in Benelux, but I can’t get Pauwels sauces, nor Baloise Insurance where I live so no pressure from the sponsors to go race away from home.
I think this also may be the case because the women’s road calendar has so much less racing and no 3 week GTs. There are some crazy people like Wout who can race a full road calendar and then still show up and win Cross races but I imagine most of those road guys need several months to recover physically and mentally from the 80-100 race days they can do in a year.
Return on investment. If I had to choose between 4 - 6 hrs of tempo per week vs. 40 - 60 minutes of threshold per week, then I would ALWAYS choose the former…as long as I’m still doing Z5 work. You can simply spend far more time and accrue far less fatigue over multiple days…which means you can be fresher for Vo2. Trying to do 4 - 6 hrs per week of threshold will simply wreck you…and you can then forget about Z5. This fatigue cost has slowly turned me off to Z4. Increasingly, I see it now as more of a no man’s land…because the cost in terms of fatigue is really not great when you are on a 20 hour week…meaning 5 rides of 3 - 4.5 hrs. Between Z5 and the long Z2 rides something has to give…and that is where Z3/Tempo comes in.
That said…obviously if you have fewer hours to train then threshold can be a good place to hang out, but the more hours you can ride, the less sense it makes to ride there.
Interestingly, p10 describes my power profile extremely closely (in terms of watts, W/kg I am 2-3kg off).
So I could be the worst sprinter, puncheur, climber and TTer in the pro peloton
Lol…It describes mine too in terms of W/kg yet I am not even close to pro level…it’s shows again that pure power numbers are only a small part of what makes a pro a pro
The caveat is that these are not power profiles so basically person with the worst sprint could have p90 60 min power. But yes, there is a lot more than pure power numbers.
Best take away is that the median (p50) male pro cyclist has 60min ftp of 5.15w/kg. Based on median 20min (6.04 w/kg), 95% is a poor indicator of 60min power. Also that the median male pro seems to be stacked towards lower duration power (sub 20min).
None of this is surprising since success in road cycling is about creating separation from the peloton. I got introduced to pro road cycling by watching the TdF (as I’m sure most of us do). This gave me the false impression that being a successful cyclist is about having huge ftp (bc GC contenders are stars of TdF). Now that I know more about pro cycling (watching classics, etc) it’s nice to see this data confirm my new believe that it’s about raw lower duration powers for the majority of events. Also about repeatability - these guys all are keeping >4 w/kg for many hours and I’m sure can repeat similar to max numbers for shorter durations many times within a race, or across multiple race days (subsequent days or many races within a short time period).
I think hard to draw too many conclusions on the longer intervals as from the abstract it seems that they pulled this data from power files rather than actually testing the cyclists (unsurprisingly!). So potentially a significant difference between the highest 60 minute power they’ve done and the highest 60 minute power they’re capable of. Can’t imagine (m)any are doing 60 minute maximal tests. And even in races climbs that long are rare, not many riders would actually race them flat out, and they’d be part of a longer stage so still not maximal hour power.
20 minutes and less likely to be much more accurate. They’ll be testing over that kind of duration, and a much higher proportion of the peloton will race flat out over climbs of that kind of duration.
@cartsman@bbarrera so yes, I agree with you here. But my point is there are hardly any 60min intervals period even at the highest level of sport. 60min max power is just not that important for performance - 20minute power is!
This vid is another testament for how difficult macro level investigations of training is. The shear amount of racing is such a confounding factor, pro cyclists have to move from block to block. This is so complex, how could simple statements like “they train x% in zone y” or “they avoid certain intensity levels” describe this. Here we have folks with superior endurance genetics, blessed with huge engines by birth, finetuning them from block to block.
I wish more pros showed their actual session goals. We see a lot on Strava but the additional information provided by the TP diary gives it the context. I also found it interesting when Blummenfelt talked about is altitude training in one of the latest vids. Individual context!
And AD’s openess provides a great opportunity to put Strava activites into context. This block in July for example. there is the eternal question, how intense do pros ride their endurance rides. We know, there are different philosophies out there. With AD it is clearly more around AeT and slightly above.
Listened to the Fascatcoaching podcast, it was interesting to hear that AD considers the training as not so important for the prep. Yep, fine tuning, that’s it.
Just listened to a German podcast where they interviewed one of Bora’s coaches. I’m always surprised at how little they talk about actual training. However, one information nugget can be shared.
Q: what has changed in training compared to 20 years ago?
A: Especially with Dan Lorang joining the team there is more focus on vo2max now. In the old days it was just volume, volume, volume. Then, these days there is hardly any time for a solid aerobic build. Off season is too short. Therefore all these training camps at altitude throughout where the aerobic strucutures are built.
As we’ve seen before, it’s moving from block to block.
