I’m looking for some advice on my training. I’m currently running the gravel race program and looking for some additional training advice. I’m 60 and in every event I enter, I finish in the top ten- usually top 5 for my age group. The only area I struggle is at the start of my races. When races go out hard, I get dropped- usually in the first 15 minutes. I am unable to go with the early surges. Once I recover I’m good and I tend to catch people during the race. The problem is that one or two riders stay away and I never catch them. I’m wondering if I should switch from the gravel program to a cyclocross “specialty phase “ for two to 4 weeks leading up to my priority events to help with lack of ability to handle hard starts, or stick with the gravel program and accept my lack of “punch” early in a race. Thoughts?
P.S. to the Trainer Road Development Team…. I am loving the new updates and the career home page. Also the workouts seem be perfectly challenging in all the right ways. Keep up the good work! And thank you for the weekly podcasts.
If you’re doing gravel events and want to focus on building your hard-start capabilities, try changing the discipline of your next event to Cross Country Marathon instead of Gravel.
That plan prescribes hard-start threshold workouts.
What OP is describing isn’t a matter of solving with hard start thresholds, it’s a lack of anaerobic capacity that needs to be built through maximal short efforts (1min max repeats) and stuff like 30/30s done at max effort to improve their ability for repeat surges
Yeah, I agree to some extent. It depends a bit on the types of gravel races they’re doing. XCM definitely lends better to longer events while still keeping things like hard starts.
Maybe for shorter or more punchy gravel races, XCO could be better..
It uses a short power build phase, some anaerobic work, and still has hard-start threshold workouts.
Nice catch @hubcyclist. I think this is a good option too.
30/30s rock! Sticking one in as a bonus workout when you’re doing Sweetspot and Threshold will do wonders for your AIFTP Prediction as well … ask he how I know.
Holy cow. Totally sounds like me…15 years ago. There was particular competitive group ride I did every week where it was somewhat chill for the first two miles. It would hit this sharp hill and everybody hit the gas. Initially, I’d ride along and watch everybody take off into the distance. After awhile, I tried to get there at the very front. That was good except then everybody would go rushing past me like I was going backward. After 3-4 years of doing 2-4 hard group rides 100-200 miles a week, I finally got the to point where I was among the fast guys on that climb. I still got dropped toward the end of that ride, but those guys were 20 or more years younger than I was.
Thank you for the feedback Eddie and others. I may change up my plan and give this a try. I do wonder if changing plans “mid stream” might mess up my progress. The plan I’m following has me in a build phase. If I cancel the current Gravel plan and switch to XCM I’m wondering if the new plan will recognize where I’m at and keep me in a build phase? I’m guessing the AI will recognize this but hesitant to change. Thoughts on that? Maybe this is best to ask the Trainer Road team.
