Welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist the ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road and coach Jonathan Lee with our head coach Chad Timberman.

Hi everybody are CEO Nate Pearson.

Hello everybody and we are going to answer more of your cycling and triathlon related questions today and mountain bike cycling covers all that stuff.

Can we stop mountain bike for a while we already we've done a lot of it but please if you want to submit questions whatever type of bicycle riding endeavor has to deal with with training getting faster anything else like that.

submit them to us at trainer road calm slash podcast a bunch of people have been asking questions to them there about what the heck do I do because it's cycle across season or it's coming and season yeah cross is coming so I need to change over my training.

Nate do we want to go through your scenario and then we can kind of use our different scenarios we can talk about me yeah and then best and then we'll switch over and cover a few different scenarios.

Hopefully it gives you we're just going to try to stick to principles here everyone may be a bit different but remember that if you stick to this meat it should help you I've got a few principles and a single track six and my copious free time.

I talked to Chad about this so we can review Chad let's play a little coach and athlete thing okay so I went through my mountain bike season and I had my a race of mountain biking that didn't turn out so well listen to the previous seven episodes or something to learn about that.

So what I had is a I had a a taper one race and then kind of a week forced off.

I've now come back and I have a week long vacation with my family in a week so it's kind of weird so basically I'm doing a we've talked about it before kind of a high.

A high TSS week kind of like a training camp and I'm going to do no exercise in all my family the whole week off and then I'm going to reset for my.

It's like that's going to be a reset for my cyclocross season this feels like a special snowflake question no it's not I did the idea to one principle in there is I'm doing a bunch of training stress and then before a vacation where I'm not going to work out doing like a pre vacation overload block yes exactly and I'm doing like three to 400 TSS per week and this will probably be a.

5 or 600 TSS week maybe a little bit more maybe 800 246 it's already 600 in 80 so it will be big we yeah yeah so you'll need the rest of the full weeks rest but you'll you'll probably come back a bit stronger than you left it's already 700 I'm confused yeah so my my plan is what day today August 12 August 8 August 8th I'm going to come back and do our cyclocross specialty plan and that is because.

I've already have a good base for the season that's going to bring me into the start of cross season and then cross season is so long for us because nationals are here in January I am going to inside of that do a build again for another eight weeks and I am going to choose which bill general short or sustain based on how I feel and when I feel like I'm lacking in.

And then do the cyclocross specialty plan once again but at a higher FTP hopefully than the previous one one thing really quick to cover if you're wondering what specialty plan to pick that one's pretty easy for cyclocross yeah what is clear though is the build you use coming into it and this can be

something you should tie to the type of the type of cycle cross racer you are I mean of course is going to dictate to some extent how you have to race it but there are riders who regardless of course format will find will race it to suit their abilities in that you know they'll they'll attack the hard climbs in you know try to inflict damage or gain time on those short hard stretches as opposed to you know maybe a breakaway rider who tries to put in a move similar to an equatorium or a road race get a gap and then sustain that gap with more evenly based riding.

And I'm sure you can guess which which way you go I mean sustain power is more for the breakaway type of cyclocross racer whereas short power or even the general power general build it would be a better fit so either way just consider how you plan to race and try to match your conditioning to this strategy and then so Chad my approach sounds sound I think so yeah and you've got time to you've got a lot of time to play with so a lot of it a lot of potential fitness to build if I had a.

If either my season wasn't so long or there was more time before my season I could drop that first specialty right just go build I kind of did my you know my mountain bike peak then I could do a build and then another yeah and then after I recommend this in almost all cases though after you've completed a specialty plan and performed at your a event I mean fitness is peaked and it's hard to watch any of that dissipate but you got to give your body a little bit of chance to recover how much that is for you it's entirely up to you could be five days could be two weeks of the base training it's not going to be a lot of time to do it.

It's it's a bit subjective I mean it's always subjective. But the fact is some sort of downtime just to reinvigorate you psychologically and to physiologically let your body rebound a bit is absolutely a good idea so I got that a single track six it is I couldn't work out yeah and then I've been doing I'm going to get it next week too I've been doing power P R's this week on the road this morning I did this is after like my you know my 280 my 220 day of CSS I did 3 25 normalize for 20 minutes is a 20 minute or all of tiger nice work that's pretty good yeah so I say I don't.

threshold is 300 plus.

Well, I say 305 now.

Very probably, yeah.

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