TBAKEL

The drugs do work the only problem is most druggies are burnt out by 75 miles so the trick is to spot them early and if you are lucky you can hop from one druggies’ wheel to another and if they are spread out enough over the ride you may have a wheel to suck for nearly all 75 miles. The last 25 you suck the wheels of tandems.

How to spot a druggie - first their bike skills suck, what they did not spend in training they have spent jacking their systems up chemically so a druggie normally has a lot of upper body motion and a low rate of spin at the pedals. In a druggies’ mind the bike and the drugs do it all, the legs and lungs are secondary, so not only look for poor riding style, look for poor riding style on a very expensive bike. Also listen carefully to the talk around you, druggies always complain and watch for the GOO packs being sucked down like beer.

Now spotting and hopping druggies wheels is only a strategy in executing sub 5 hour centuries. You have to be in shape, ride smoothly and efficiently, and be in a mental condition to suck wheels of low skill druggie riders who have no clue how to ride in a pack and you need to be able to do this for up to 4 hours. In order to do this you must do what a druggie does not do……………………… train.

Now understand that your 50 years or older, Cat 1 or 2 is probably not going to happen until the next life so train to ride distance and ride to enjoy the training. Here is a system I was taught in 1974 by my time trial and pursuit coach and is the system I still use to this day, the only difference is that I use to race two weekends a month during the summer / fall portion of the schedule, now I ride centuries and aim for sub 5 hour 100 mile rides. Each portion of schedule has a skill goal, a conditioning goal, and a fun goal. To ride well over many years the mind and body both need to enjoy the experience.

Spring training should be 14 weeks riding a non freewheeling fixed gear with a 44 tooth chain ring and a 18 tooth cog. A fixed gear is the fastest why to condition yourself and develop a smoother power delivery.

The Skill goal is to smooth out your power deliverance to the rear wheel until nothing above the waist is moving and you are comfortable at 90 rpm “running on pedals”. The Conditioning goal is to reestablish the bike as part of your life style and build thighs and lungs and to learn to enjoy riding. The Fun goal is to learn / practice track stands, wheel hops, 90s, 180s, and pedal kicks when stopped at lights or stop signs (makes stopping more fun and you can entertain the traffic around you) and take your jersey off over your head while riding hands off.

These fun skills will come to good use on summer and fall rides when you want to drop a pack of druggies, just wait until they are *****ing about how hard the pace is and then sit up pull your jersey off over your head and announce that you finally feel warmed up. Druggies will shell out the back like bricks. At stop lights when druggies are dragging and *****ing, hang a track stand and then very slowly hop the bike around 180, pedal kick the front wheel up and spin 180 and set the front wheel down, hold the track stand and announce that you are bored. You will not make many friends this way but lets face it, who needs druggies for friends (if they are drugging on the bike they have issues off) and if you are ridding a century out of state you will not be seeing the losers again anyway.

The schedule:

Spring:
Weeks 1-2, 1 hour every day for 14 days
Weeks 3-4, 1.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 5-6, 2 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 7-8, 2.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 9-10, 3 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 11-12, 3.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 13-14, 4.0 hours every day for 14 days

Don’t worry about heart rate or miles, time in the saddle is all that counts. Weeks 11 through 14 will be rough but the muscle and mental conditioning this schedule builds is fantastic. Hopefully you can ride to and from work which really helps you get the time in.

Ride according to how you feel, if you are not into a hard ride, ride easy, you will soon find out that the weather does not give a crap for how you feel anyway so over the 14 weeks you will learn to ride through the mental issues.

Ride alone. This is one very important rule for riding alone means you deal with your own issues and you do all the work yourself to overcome those issues. Riding distance is not a team effort, it is a solo effort, so learn to enjoy the ride, the time, the weather, and the pain,…………………………. alone.

Diet is harder to figure out, billions of books have been written and you can read them but your body doesn’t care about what someone else says, I found that my body craves the foods that provide it the best recovery so I feed it what gives it a rush.

The only performance enhancing drug you should use is sleep in fact I try to overdose on it as much as possible.

The tallest hurdle to overcome in the 14 weeks will be you and that silly thing called your mind, we were given the ability to reason but I found that in respect to grinding out time in the saddle on a rainy cold day the ability to reason is of little use for had I used this ability I would not be riding.

Next years spring training will not be any easier but each successive summer and fall riding season will get even better.

Summer and Fall

Skill goal – transition smooth power delivery to geared freewheel bike. Conditioning goal - maintain Spring Condition level yet ease up on the “biker” lifestyle after all it is spring and summer and the opposite sex does look good on a bike but not as good as they do at the beach. Rest days are for skate boarding, surfing, messing about the house and dating your spouse. Fun goal – ride different routes, even rails to trails. Again no heart rate monitors, no mileage tracking, just time in the saddle over different routs and make it fun.

Monday – 2 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 18 tooth cog
Tuesday – 3 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 16 tooth cog
Wednesday – 4 hours geared bike
Thursday -3 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 16 tooth cog
Friday - 2 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 18 tooth cog

Saturday - rest day or organized ride on the geared bike. If you have an organized ride on Sunday, don’t ride on Saturday

Sunday – if Saturday was a rest day, organized ride on the geared bike. If you rode on Saturday don’t ride on Sunday

If there are no organized rides on Saturday or Sunday have fun off the bike both days, sex is always a good alternative to the bike and with lots of foreplay you can make it an endurance sport and with repetition you can count it as anaerobic interval training.

Early in the season I tend to use 25 and 50 mile rides as my organized Saturday or Sunday rides. I tend to ride one a month. I don’t care for bike clubs so my organized rides are those conducted to raise money for charities and the like. Come fall I focus on 100 mile rides (centuries) and have ridden centuries in Oklahoma, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, Rode Island, Connecticut and Wisconsin. This is my competitive time of the year and I have a lot of fun, normally I ride 4 centuries each fall.

Winter – FUN time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, concerts, theater, plays, holidays, trials riding and rollers.

Concerts, theater, plays, and holiday events give you time with your spouse (significant other for those who are not married). The goal is to focus on someone else in your life and make the bike a very distant second. My wife says this period is when I focus (drive her nuts) on her so that she will be more than happy for me to start spring training.

Rollers will improve the smoothness of your power delivery and when you are able to hold 90 rpm at the pedals and pull your jersey off over your head, go for the rolling mount where you ride up along side the rollers and hop the bike up on to them and start spinning and when you are done hop off. Practice this someplace in the house where you have room to fall! This took me years to master and yet my first rolling mount or dismount each winter usually results in the worst fall of the season

Trials riding is fun, you can pick up an old trials bike pretty cheap, the frames are built strong and will last forever, learning to track stand and hop the bike up onto a picnic table and other things your spouse will frown upon is a lot of fun, it is however how I broke a collarbone. If you have a reasonable sized back yard you can trials even on really cold days and be close enough to warmth that frost bite should not be an issue. You can trials anywhere, a trials bike is one of the best bikes to take on winter business trips. While the druggies are sitting in the hotel bar you can be practicing wheel hops and 180’s on the hotel landscaping.

I ride the rollers whenever I feel like it and I trials whenever there is nothing going on around the house or my spouse is off running solo.

TBakel 53 years old