Originally Posted by ratebeer
The age of year-round cycling and the ability to make slow, constant, sustainable gains is somewhat incompatible with the idea of seasonal peaking in road riders. Given the lack of scientific proof in this area, despite the millions of dollars in competitive cycling and the heavy research in other areas of cycling and training, Occam's Razor suggests the simpler idea of sustainable gains, and not seasonal peaking, is probably more true.
i don't think seasonal peaking and sustainable gains are mutally exclusive. at least when you look at it over the long run.
take the floyd landis 8 year training idea. each year is broken up by peaks, but the overall trend of training is to increase workload over a very long period of time. if you graphed his fitness, it would generally increase over the years but fluctuate several times during a season.
a similar thing happens to amature racers. as you move from cat 5 to 4, it's pretty much a given that you'd increase your workload. the jump to cat 3 will require more training, then 2 etc. it could take years to reach cat 2 and by the time you do, you'd undoubtably have a higher degree of fitness than when you started. and most are peaking a couple of times a season.