Welcome to the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast presented by trainer road. Today, we are joined by pro cyclist,

Haley Smith. Haley, I'm excited to have you on. You've been on the podcast before, and today we're going to talk all about signs that you're getting faster. If you're wondering, this is the Haley Smith that you've seen. She's an Olympian. She races in the Lifetime Grand Prix. She rides for the Trek Drift List team.

She rides into those super cool looking map kits,

which by the way, your national championship kit.

Like, I know everyone wants to keep hold on to their jerseys, but that was a really cool one to hold on to. It looks really cool. Thank you. Yeah, and congratulations on that. Also rides for the feed and for KOROS, just awesome stuff. Thanks partners for supporting her.

That's really great for the brand supporting Haley.

If you want to support Haley, you can do that.

We're going to talk again about reviewing kind of like a whole year and reviewing your

training and your racing as you're going throughout your season and trying to find signs of

you getting faster.

And we're going to do this through a very natural way.

Rebecca asked a question to the podcast and, Hey, coaches, my race season is officially done and I was hoping you could share your perspectives on how to do a year in review of your training. Maybe coach Jonathan could model it with us for, or model it for us with his year. I'm not sure I'd be prepared to have my own year, or my year in review be that public, is what Rebecca says. So I thought it would be much more

interesting instead of my season to talk, which probably most podcast listeners also kind of know

about the general gist of it. But instead, Haley, I kind of wanted to walk through your season.

You, for those that don't know, you should go follow Haley on Instagram. Haley, I kind of wanted to walk through your season. You, for those that don't know, you should go follow Haley on Instagram.

Haley, I appreciate the fact that you're willing to be transparent with your life as a professional

cyclist, the ups and downs, the challenges, and everything else.

And you share that through your Instagram.

And I think that it's really helpful because it normalizes a lot of things that athletes might be afraid to admit to themselves and others. And I kind of want to go through your whole season through the highs and lows and just talk through the whole thing. And maybe we can do kind of like at the end of it, the things that you've learned, but we can gather a lot as you go through. Are you good with that? Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay. So Haley, you started off your season this year, racing Cape Epic, which is new for you. You hadn't done Cape Epic before. In fact, I don't really think you've done a whole lot of like big epic stage racing like that before, right? I've actually done quite a bit of stage racing. The first one I did was called

Croc Trophy in Australia in 2017, which was eight days. And since then, I've done some

stage racing every single year. I actually quite love it. Yeah. How many, how many do you do every

year? It depends on the year, but it's usually, usually only one gigantic one, but often I'll hit at least two stage races, maybe three.

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