Originally Posted by Racer Ex

Example: You want to get better at TT's, because you're doing a lot of stage racing and it's a huge factor in GC.

You like doing sprint intervals though. And hate doing 20 minute intervals. And your TT bike needs some work on the fit. So you go out and do sprint intervals, and maybe once a week you'll do a 20 minute interval. When you go on group rides rather than sit on the front and pull the field around, you sit in and wait for the sprints. You justify both of these actions by telling yourself you want to keep your sprint sharp and hey, you did that one 20m interval last week so you don't want to overdo it.

Then you get 56th in the TT and tell everyone how you suck at TT's.

What you needed to do was get on the TT bike, and hammer out a bunch of 20 minute intervals. You need to work on pacing, and ride all the TT's you can. Not the entire solution, but an example of more appropriate training to get good at TT's.

That's the self directed fib.

The external misstep is listening to bad advice. You are going to race a bunch of 40 minute crits and one road race next year. You go through the threads and see lots of advice to "ride lots" and people talking about big base rides. Or you have a clueless coach who has you doing 5 hour mountain rides. So you do this. You come into the first crit and get spit out the back. And the second. And you also notice you're tired.

What you should have been doing was high intensity, short, sharp efforts, working on your sprint, Etc.

The human body is pretty malleable. I had a teammate who had done RAAM a bunch of times, then decided he wanted to become a sprinter. He worked with weights and on sprint drills. They ended up force upgrading him out of the 4's because he kept taking all the primes. He wasn't going to improve his sprint doing RAAM training. He had a training bucket (time/stamina) that was "X" big. He put the right stuff in the bucket.

While this seems obvious stated as such, people are pretty good at pretzel logic. A fair bit of the advice on this forum should end with "because that's what I like to do". The better stuff to follow is "because that's what produced success".