The pros are better than us because they’re smarter. Not more intelligent than us; rather, each rider has a support team with a director sportif, coach, mechanic, chef, masseuse and other staff who collectively know more about cycling than you do. Races are rarely won just because someone has a bigger engine and more powerful legs. Rather, the support team puts together for the racer a personal plan to peak for a specific event, and a race strategy.
Coach John Hughes shows you how you can develop a personal knowledge base to peak for and achieve your best performance in his new eArticle, Your Best Season Ever, Part 2: Peaking for and Riding Your Event, which RBR is publishing this week.
Peaking for the Event
Coach Hughes prepares his clients for a key event the same way the pros prepare. Although his clients don’t ride at the same level as the pros, he uses the same process with each rider to peak for the key event in which the client is pushing his or her personal limits.
His new eArticle shows you how to adapt Coach Hughes’ very successful process to peak for your own key event. You will learn how to:
- Analyze your event to figure out what’s required for success
- Develop specific training objectives based on that analysis
- Create and test a personal strategy for your particular event
- Train for peak fitness for your individual event
- Learn what you should eat, and when, leading up to and during the event
- Select the optimum equipment, including how to get the most bang for your buck
- Learn mental focus so that 100% of your energy goes into your performance
- Taper so that you are fresh and on form on the starting line
- Control how you ride your event for best performance
Coach Hughes uses five hypothetical events as examples, telling you how to address all of these issues for each event:
- Climb Whiner’s hill in 15:30. Whiner’s ascends 525 feet in two miles (160m in 3.2 km), a 5% grade.
- Finish the Race of Truth 10-mile (15 km) club time trial in 27:30 (averaging 21.8 mph / 35.1 km/h).
- Finish with the Big Dogs’ “A” group on the 50-mile (100 km) Saturday ride rather than getting dropped.
- Finish the Hills and Valleys Century in 7:15 (or 200K in 9:00).
- Ride your first 100K on a personally defined route
You can extrapolate from the details he offers in these examples to peak for your own specific event.
Riding the Event
Before an important race the pros ride key sections of a course such as the cobbles or the key climb so that they are familiar with the course and know how to ride these important sections. Coach Hughes’ explains the best way for you to learn how to prepare for your event either by riding the course or simulating it if you don’t have easy access to the course.
To achieve a peak performance when riding the actual event, you don’t “just do it.” Rather, you need to be in control of as many of the variables as possible. Coach Hughes explains how to control the key variables for each of the five sample events to help you succeed.
In his eArticle Your Best Season Ever, Part 1, Coach Hughes walks you through how to create your own specific, personalized training plan and then get the most out ofyour training.
Part 2 takes what you’ve learned in the first article and builds on it to help you achieve your ultimate goal(s) for the season.
Coach John Hughes’ new 37-page eArticle Your Best Season Ever, Part 2: Peaking for and Riding Your Event is available today for only $4.99 ($4.24 for Premium Members after their 15% discount).
Leave a Reply