HOW TO TRAIN FOR THE VALENCIA EPIC RACE
In colaboration with PSYCLING COACH
From PSYCLING COACH we want to help all those cyclists who do not know where to start when preparing a race like Valencia Epic Race.
I’m Javier Requeni Guillem and the first advice I’m going to give you is “believe in yourself” we never know what we are capable of, if we don’t try lots of times, we are all capable if we believe in ourselves. Don’t set limits to yourself and neither let anyone set them for you, believe in yourself.
Valencia Epic Race is a race to give you away, one of those presents that stay in you mind, one of those presents that will make you remember how happy you were, one of those presents you would make to the person who you love the most knowing you wouldn't disappoint.
But before starting to prepare anything, you should know what is your goal in this race. Our objective is completing it? Or is it being somewhere around the middle or above in the leaderboard? Depending on which is out goal we will be focusing our training’s in different ways.
To explain in a very general way how our body would work, we are comparing it with a hybrid car, when we go through the cities slowly the predominant engine is the electric motor, something similar would happen with our body, when we go slowly our predominant fuel would be fats since it would be our most efficient substrate. Now imagine that we go to the road and we want more rhythm, the hybrid car would start also using the fuel engine to add motion and help push the car further, with the human body it would be the same, when in the human you start demanding more energy to move the body, its starts using other type of enzymes apart from fats such as hydrates. This due to the fact that when the body tries to make an effort the fats alone are not enough to make the body function how needed, but with the hydrates everything changes. Now, we really want to run and we are going to a circuit with our hybrid car, we want to get the most out of it, at this point it will be the gasoline engine that makes the biggest effort, taking into account the energy expense, in this case of gasoline, will increase considerably and soon we will have to stop to refuel or slow down. Having this in mind, when we go to a short distance race, and we go all out, the thing that we are going to need the most are hydrates because they will be the main energy source for our body, as well as using the energy saved up in our muscles .
Once we know this now we can move on and speak about the moment where our car and our body change from using the electric engine and the fats, to using the fuel engine and the hydrates to obtain energy. This moment would correspond to our threshold one. The next moment to assess is when the car goes from using both engine to using more the fuel one than the electric one, same as our body when it goes from using the fats metabolism, to using the hydrates metabolism. This second key point would correspond to our threshold two.
Now then, after knowing this, if our main objective is to finish the race, then we should focus on the first threshold where we use both of the enzymes as fuel to produce energy for our body. But if our goal is to be somewhere around the middle of the leaderboard then apart from focusing on the first one we should also train the second threshold, especially as we get closer to the Valencia Epic Race.
And how do we know what those key moments are? Well, we will obtain these by doing a 20 min test at the highest pace we can endure, it is important to have in mind the terrain where you are going to do the test, because if we do it in a terrain full of ups and downs the rhythm won’t be stable and the test wouldn’t be as accurate as one done on a flat road, so this is what we are aiming for.
The test requires a specific warm up, if you don’t do it the right way is possible to get a result which is not reliable. The specific warm up is the following one:
FASES DEL TEST TIEMPO DESCRIPCIÓN
It will be key to do 5min at our fullest before the test, this is needed to subtract the high-energy metabolic pathways and to make our test as close as possible to the threshold two.
Once this 20 min go by and the data is obtained we will proceed approximate the training zone. First we will multiply the test result, the medium heart beat frequency times 0.95 in case we want to find out the power in watts or times 0.97 in case you want also the heart beat frequency. For example, if we have obtained an average of watts of 250, (250x0.95=237.5) and if we’ve obtained 170 of medium heart beat (170x0.97=164.9) taking these values as a 100% we will obtain training zone that will correspond to the FTP during an hour by means of a rule of three.
Note: We will always take the integer and non-decimal values.
Once the result and the rest of the zones have been obtained, we should continue elaborating our training plan. How we were saying our only objective is to be FINISHER we concentrate in the training of our zone to the maximum efficiency when it comes to the optimization of the fats, otherwise if our objective is to end in the middle of the leaderboard or higher besides training the threshold two we should also train the threshold three, four and five to be able to endure intense efforts.
On the right side of the table we have the optimal times to train each zone, we also have the number of intervals and the time to rest this time will be very variable depending on the course depending on the level and experience from each person. Thanks to this reason we advise to visit a qualified trainer to be able to get the most out of our hours on the bike.
From PSYCLING COACH we encourage all cyclist to participate in the Valencia Epic Race, a race for everyone without exception.
Everything is posible when you think is posible, its time to show yourselves what are you capable of.
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