Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore, joined by Empirical Cycling Coach Rory Porteous, as usual. And thank you, everybody, for listening. If you are new here, please consider subscribing to the podcast if you like what you're hearing. And if you are a returning listener, thank you so much for coming back. And because you apparently like what you're hearing, if you want to support the show, you can do so at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. If you want to kick a couple bucks over to help with, you know, platform and hosting fees and all that stuff, that's great. Thank you so much. If you would like to reach out for coaching at empiricalcyclingatgmail.com, we are always taking on athletes. We can do consultations as well. We can talk about your race season. We can talk about anything you want. We can look at your files. We can plan out something for a race, et cetera. We can plan out all the way to next year if you want, or even just talk about general training principles. All of that's great. Shoot me an email, empiricalcyclingatgmail.com. And if you would really like to support the show, Word of mouth is the best thing you can do. We really appreciate all of that, really appreciate all of the kind words and the nice emails and the recommendations that are going a long way. So thank you everybody for all of that. And if you'd like to ask a question for the podcast, you can do so. Follow me on Instagram at Empirical Cycling. Obviously, and go look for the purple question box up in the stories. The orange one is the Weekend AMAs that's going on right now as we're recording. And the purple one is for the podcast. I will prompt you with what we're talking about and do not expect an answer up on my Instagram. But anyway, so here we are with Rory. And I also should apologize, by the way, if anybody can hear a little hum, that is probably my microphone. I'm trying to. Get rid of that. So sorry. I just moved house and there's a little RF interference. So I'm doing my best to take care of that. But anyway. Once the bad audio quality isn't just me. Touche. All right. So it's currently June, mid-June in the Northern Hemisphere. And most of our audience is American, although I certainly thank all of the people in Europe and Australia and Asia and Africa. Do we have anybody in Antarctica? That would be so cool. Depends if Kyle gets another invite again. Yeah, well, Kyle's going to be in the desert soon enough, apparently. So looking forward to hearing his stories on that again. So anyway, we are talking about bouncing training and rest during race season. So we are currently mid-race season for a lot of people. For, I'd say, the huge majority of both of our clients, it's currently mid-race season. And so we've got results coming in, we've got things we need to manage. So let's talk about what we need to manage, what we look for in terms of signs of fatigue, training, what you can expect from training, the type of training you should think about. And I wanted to actually start with what is a light and busy race schedule? Because there's kind of a gamut, and I want to give some recommendations that... Fit just about everybody's needs, but also at the same time, we need to recognize that obviously everybody's got very different needs, and somebody who races one, two, or three times a year has a very different schedule than somebody who's going to race 30 to 50 race days per year. So, Rory, what are the extremes of your clients? Because I know you've got one person who races the most out of everybody we have in Empirical Cycling. and she's done a great job at adjusting to that. She knows exactly who she is and I know she'll be listening to this and I need her to know as I say this, you've done a great job so far. The broad extremes of the people who are planning something for Their season is going to range from people who have that one thing they want to go and do, be that a road race, it could be, you know, national time trial championships, it could be a Gran Fondo, it could be cycling the length of Vermont, as one of the clients tried to do this. I've done that one. It's a great time. You stop at Sandy's and you get a sandwich and a coffee. Oh, it's the best. I think it looks horrible. Teach their own. But then you've obviously also got those people who want to race just about every week, and if they want to race every week, it's not likely they want to race more than once a week as well. And that can be anything from doing a road race at the weekend, a crit series, an omnium, Wednesday Night Worlds as well on top of that, anything you do with your club, training rides with friends, you can start to really add up in terms of where you're spending your time during the week and how much of it is at intensity. Yeah, and actually, I wanted to ask you, I haven't asked you yet, have you, one of our new proprietary charts that I sent over to our coaches, have you checked that one out yet? Because I've been using it recently to track intensity and it's extremely useful. Well, I find it useful. I have to try and remember which one that was. Okay, so that's a no. Anyway. You and I were trying to do the same thing at the same time. Yeah, let's call it a no. Anyway, so, because that's one of the things that is difficult to quantify. And I've been working for many months on being able to quantify that because it's basically been a big need. And that's something that we're going to talk about. What are we doing with that qualitatively? Because racing is hard. For a lot of the time, it's a very high degree of intensity. And a lot of the time, the duration can be also extremely high as well as the intensity. Like a lot of the European Spring Classics are probably the highest combination of duration and intensity of races that exist. are an absolute monster, basically. You know, if you look at anybody on the men's and women's side, what they can do is phenomenal. And so that's kind of like an extreme of intensity and duration. But we've got things like criteriums. We've got like short hill climbs, like, you know, one to maybe eight, ten minutes. And then we've also got long gravel races or even like ultras. So that'll be... You know, a couple hours to several days, potentially, and at a low intensity, but I forget who said this, but at some point, quantity has a quality all its own. It sounds Stalin, doesn't it? I think it was Stalin. Okay, so it could be Napoleon too. All right, we'll go with Stalin. So that's the kind of thing that we need to watch out for, because unless you are in like a You know, like a P12 race or something like that, and the brake goes up the road, and then you are sitting in the peloton and just like bored for several hours before people gear up for the final like 10 or 20k or something. The track sprinter experience. The track sprinter experience. Road sprinter experience. Also, yes. I mean, depending on the course, some occasional race days are not that hard. And I remember early in my coaching days when I started coaching people in the elite categories, I was actually shocked. that some races were not hard, like legitimately not hard. And they would be hard for like an hour or two, then they would be easy, easy, easy, and then hard for like the last 20 minutes. And it was, you know, it's a nice little like J-shaped curve. But that still has some intensity to it, and it all needs to be managed. So I wanted to have you and I come here with, we've got three do's and three don'ts. for what to do and what not to do during race season. And we'll have to talk about at the extremes of a light race schedule and the extremes of a hard race schedule. So, Rory, why don't we start with you? What's your first do? So one of the things that most often comes up, and this is going to be something that is more of an issue for people who have a very packed race schedule. and that is what does and doesn't need to be a B event. Now everyone knows what their A event is. It's the thing you want to train for all year. You've probably got two, maybe three of them if you're being sensible. Yeah, four hardbacks and like even that's dicey. And you'll also have your C events which are almost certainly going to be like the local crit series or the things you do with your club or whatever is the things that you don't mind if. You skip them, or the results don't mean anything to you beyond fun. But more often than not, that just means that you have more B events than you have C events, and really that should not be the case. A lot of people will over-prioritize the events that they're going to go and do, but maybe don't care as much about, but they'd like to perform well at. It's that horrible... you know, seesaw balance between I want to go and have fun and this isn't important to me and what that actually ends up meaning in practice for you as a racer is you're going to go and try and have fun which means you're going to go race hard in most situations and I think when it comes to balancing your fitness through a season one of the things that's really important to do is understand when you just let some of those races go or you just go to those races and use them for like You're not there to contest a field sprint at the end unless you land at the end of one. It's good luck. You go to, say, try something. Today I'm going to go and get in, I'm going to try and get in the second break of the day and see how it goes. And then the break gets caught back and you drop out or you just tail gun for the rest of the day. Or it could be that you're going to a bee crit and you decide I'm going to tail gun this whole thing. You use it for an opportunity for something else. Can get a result of it if you want, but we're not racing everything as if it was an A race, which I think is the danger a lot of people fall into. Yeah, and I think the balance point there is the fact that in a B race, you secretly kind of want to do well or openly want to do like okay, and you're like, I want to have okay legs, I don't want to have like the best legs I'm going to have all season. But if you do that often enough, When every race is kind of important, no race is important. It really becomes like this kind of like flat kind of maintaining fitness-ish. And then when it comes time to free your A race, you've been kind of racing hard all year already. And you haven't had many ups and downs. And when everything's a B race, like, you know, if that's your goal, that's okay. If you want to make everything a B race, you want to be at 90% all year. or like 80 to 90%, that's fine as long as you know that and your coach knows that and the expectations are clear because when you've got real expectations to do well at 20 events out of your 30 or like 8 events out of your 10, depending on how packed in they are, that can be an issue to really get there, well, get to your A race. with your best legs because really that's kind of what we're talking about because when also you've got a bunch of B races, you are kind of not really training through them and that becomes a problem too. It's like when you start missing out on training to be fresh for races all the time, all the time. Yeah, yeah. A B race to most people, it shouldn't be like this but it does end up being like this. It's just a way of saying I'm not going to be sad if it doesn't go to plan. And in reality, that's completely true, and that is what a B race should be, but a B race should also come with not just the mental expectations, but the physical expectations of how you go there. It's not going all in on it. That is part of it, is people can have an A race crit, and they can have a bunch of B race crits, and I'm willing to bet in most cases, They're racing those exactly the same way. Which, at the end of the day, I'm glad you're not disappointed they all go well. But, you get to the end of that, and you get to the A race, it's not going to go well, and you are going to be disappointed. Yeah. Actually, that dovetails... I hear your cat, Rory. Oh, good. That's peanut. So, that dovetails really well with my first do, which is to use... Some races for training. And the more you race, the more you will have to use your races for training. And it's kind of strange to be like, all right, this is my training race. Especially if you are traveling a good deal during the year. Like if you travel a lot to your races, going there and being like, well, I just spent all this money and all this time getting here. Why am I going to like... not try to do well. You can go try to do well, but maybe don't expect your absolute best legs or something like that. Or think, this is a training race. I know it's like an American Crit Cup Series race, but sometimes you just have to take an L on your fitness for that race. Kind of like you were saying, if it's going to be a B-priority race, drop it to a C and think, I'm going to be tired after this race maybe, but I've got a long, easy ride tomorrow, and I still got to do it, you know, instead of going, okay, that was a race, now I got to rest for a couple of days, like, you can still train a little bit, dot, dot, dot, asterisk, asterisk. Yeah, it's kind of like, if anyone's been watching the Dauphiné in the week before that we recorded this, like, two things there. One, Primoz Roglic definitely went into that as a B race. Nice to win, but he's there to get himself ready for a different race. And you saw that in the effect of how he rode in the final days. He didn't need to chase after Jorgensen at the end. He just did what he needed to do to finish it. And that's part of that prioritization that you're talking about there in terms of turning up and just doing what you need to do to get ready for the thing that actually matters. Yeah. Actually, speaking of Roglic, he actually has a very interesting race schedule to me, because he races less than a lot of folks do. You know, like, like last year, he raced Torino, Volta, Catalonia, and then the Giro, then he did Burgos, and then he did the Vuelta. Like, I mean, that's a lot of race days, it's a lot of stage races, but at the same time, like, that's a handful of races, and if you compare them to like Bernal or somebody like that, Bernal races a lot. And so, if you are planning out your race season, You may want to think, what kind of schedule is better for me personally? Are you somebody who does better with more racing and kind of more kind of maintenance in between? Or are you somebody who would rather train and then have fewer races that you go to in better shape? Yeah, it's the comparison, especially this year with Matthew Van Der Poel and Wout Van Aert where Van Der Poel just went to everything. Raced really well off the back of it, because he's Matthew Van Der Poel, whereas Wout van Aert took the gamble of, I'm going to go hide at the top of a volcano for a bit, and that was how he chose to take his prep going into the two races that mattered most. But he still had beat races in there, he still did turn up to events that go the way he wanted, but in fact, talking about Matthew Van Der Poel, you can think back to two years ago now, was it, where is your, what was, what did you call them, the world's worst? Worst maintained Bugatti Chiron. Oh, actually, you know, well, hold on, because Van Der Poel also only went to a handful of races this spring. He went to like six. And he won five of the three? Saxo, right? He won the ones that mattered. That's the... Yeah, yeah. It was Melan Sanremo he didn't win because he helped his teammate win. Much respect. Anyway, so, well, so anyway, the reason that I'm happy we brought this up is because if, especially if you are using a lot of your races for training, this is especially where you need to decide, should I race more or should I race less? Am I better served by going to more races? Are there things I need to work on or is this fitness that I cannot get in training? If yes, Great, go to more races. If not, if you need just a handful of efforts and you don't need that much high intensity before you're ready to like go hop in a crit and, you know, be in the top five or ten or win, then you need to know that about yourself too. Because I've certainly got clients who run the gamut between people who need to race a lot and who race better racing a lot and people who need to race less and who race better when they go to fewer events. And, you know, it's partly Physiology, it's partly, you know, mental probably to some degree. And, you know, there's a long list of reasons you would do either. So ask yourself, which one of these folks am I? And if you're not sure, start thinking about it. I think the one occasion I would say, not totally ignore this advice, but consider what your actual goal is for improvement. Brand New to Racing, in which case the most valuable thing you can do is just get experience and learn. You still have things like B and A races, but you should be putting more of an emphasis on some of the stuff I said at the start, like I'm going to try and tailgun this time, or I'm going to try and get a breakaway, I'm going to try and, you know, if you're very new, if you're not confident in your fitness, I'm just going to try and stay in the pack and have the quietest race possible. Some of the best races you can have as a new racer are I'm turning up and I'm going to try and do as little as I can. Yeah. Because it's that whole thing of the person who's got the best chance of winning the race, usually the one that produced the less power throughout, because they only produced it at the moment that it mattered. Yeah. Yeah. How many clients do you have? Sorry, I was going to say, how many clients do you have who are like, how come I didn't, this is a really hard race, how come I don't see any power PBs? Usually we time quite well. Sometimes we get power babies. Yeah, that is part of it is if you go into these races and you do end up tired, of course, you're never going to have those watts when you need them. Yeah, and also racing with less watts and doing well is better than racing with more watts and doing the same. Anyway, so yeah, so you're right about if you're newer and you need experience, go get the experience for sure. Like the best thing you can do is show up, but don't overdo it. So, we have, I think, in the past, spoken about the importance of something like a mid-season break. When it comes to, and again, this is going to be another one of those things that really focuses on people with a very dense schedule, usually you can take a pretty high level view and look at your calendar and work out, here are the weeks where there's not much going on, and depending on when those weeks sit within your race schedule, you should lock that in, no matter what, as a week where you're going to do little to nothing, because you need to recover. It's kind of the thing that Cole said a few times in the podcast of don't fuck with your rest days, or this is don't fuck with your rest week. Yeah, and not only that, especially if you are going to have late season races, and by late season I mean like past about September, so whether you're racing road kind of late in the season, or if you are racing cyclocross, and you could potentially race cyclocross here in the US in some areas, you can race it from like August. through like January. So you can have a very long cross season and it's very difficult to do both, especially if you start racing early in the spring, like February, March. If you're doing both, you need more rest. It's like non-negotiable because especially if you are doing a lot of races, you are going to get to the end of your season. You might not even get to the end of your season. You might be like, I've got 10 more races I plan to go to, but I'm done. And I've done that. My second cyclocross season ever. It was New England back in the big heyday of cyclocross. And I went to like, I raced two or three times a week for like a month and a half, like two months straight. And I planned to go all the way to the last race of the season. And I didn't even make it through October. 

Well done. At least you had fun. I did have fun until I didn't have fun anymore. I got sick and I kept racing while I was sick because I'm an idiot. So don't do that, kids. Yeah, that's part of the side effect of what I'm getting at is it's not just about trying to make sure that your performance levels after that break can stay high. It's that the more fatigue you allow yourself to carry, the more and more likely that you're just... For whatever reason, going to have the wheels fall completely off. Yep. Alright, so my second do is do easy volume. Easy endurance riding, properly easy, and it helps maintain your fitness really well. It helps maintain VO2 max, especially if you are racing somewhat frequently, that will definitely maintain your VO2 max. When you are racing frequently, the duration of the races is actually kind of low for most people, especially if you are, well, most races, I'd say, are like, you know, one to two hours for most people, most amateurs a lot of the time, and where training rides might be like three or four hours. So your regular training week might be 15 hours, and if you are racing on the weekend, that might pull you down to like eight or ten. And so if you get a chance to do a longer easy ride, even like every week or two, it does not go out of style. And as long as you feel like your legs feel fine while you're riding easy and nothing seems off, then yeah, please go ahead and do easy riding because, well, we'll get to my don't on all that stuff in a little bit. I'm sure you've got a similar don't. Yeah, I've got a non-insignificant number of clients who report usually after an event when they get a long ride on the Sunday. Felt really crap to start with, and then 30 minutes to an hour in, they're like, I felt great. And that's another one of those advantages. The Long Easy Endurance Ride just helps you with a bit of recovery. It helps you understand exactly how fatigued you actually are. Because if you're really in the hole, no matter what you do, you're not going to feel good throughout the rest of that ride. Yeah. And I usually give people, after an hour, if you don't feel good and warmed up, that's your bingo point. Go home. Just turn around. Alright, what's your third do? So, again, you're probably seeing a pattern here. I think a lot of the people who have problems of balancing their fitness in season are the ones that have to race a lot. Plan your training in advance, knowing that it's going to be somewhere between hard to impossible to do anything constructive as your season goes on. If you want to do a VO2 max block to make your FTP go up, you need to do that before your race season begins. If you want to start really working on something like anaerobic capacity and try and develop that top-end power, you need to do that during a period where you know you're going to be able to recover, you don't have to worry about going to a race and get slammed. You can sort of... Cross some of the training and the racing, depending on what kind of racing you're doing. But if you're trying to do really targeted, focused sessions, you need to know in advance, especially when it comes to identifying your A and B races, where are you going to slot all of this in? Because if you get it wrong, again, it's that thing of you're just carrying a lot of unnecessary fatigue into the things that matter to you most. Yeah, and that actually gets to one of my don'ts, which we won't get to yet. But I'll get to my last do, and we'll circle back around to this. My do is watch your FTP and your TTE and your sprint. There's a couple caveats on this one, though. For most people, you're going to fatigue, especially if you've got a quite busy race season. If you do a handful of minutes, and I mean like three, four, five, six minutes, of FTP during your warmup, it should feel like FTP. If it doesn't, this is a very worrying sign. And it's not that your FTP has gone down, I mean, really, but if it feels like shit, that's a bad sign that you're carrying a ton of fatigue. If you cannot pedal that FTP watts, that's a sure sign that you need to just take a day and just rest, eat, nap, like, Get your whole recovery routine going, especially the eating and napping part, and you will feel better. But if FTP feels bad, that's a bad sign. For TTE, especially when you're carrying a lot of fatigue, one of the most common things I see is that the amount of interval time somebody can do while fresh versus while fatigued, while fatigued is obviously going to be a lot lower. Like, if normally in season you can do like a 3x20 FTP, and mid-race season you're like, man, I can barely squeak out 3x10, that's a sign that you're fatigued, cut and dry. It doesn't necessarily... That's when FTP feels normal. Yeah, when FTP feels normal. And so it does not necessarily mean that you need more training, it usually indicates that you need more rest. And the last one I said is sprint. So your sprint watts for most people will be the highest when you are fresh. And when you have a good amount of glycogen in your legs, when you are well slept, and when you are motivated, and if you have any kind of residual fatigue anywhere, your sprint will probably suffer. So like, let's say you normally do about a thousand watts for your sprint and warming up one day, you normally see... You're like, oh, I wonder how I'm feeling. FTP feels okay, I'll try a sprint. If it doesn't feel good, that usually means you should probably stay away from sprinting for a little bit. If you've got a sprint workout and your normal watts are 1,000 and you're doing like 700, maybe you should probably take a day off. That would be my question to you, is if someone is not just calling themselves a sprinter because that's all they ever do, but they actually are a sprinter, they're dropping. 15, 1600 watts in a sprint. What is the difference that you would say between, oh, it was just a bad sprint versus it's fatigue? Like how many watts does someone have to lose for them to think things aren't normal? Usually you can feel it. You can feel a really good sprint in your legs when it's happening. Like every sprint PR I've ever hit, I knew it was PR as soon as I started moving my legs. But, a lot of the time, like, because I toss in a handful of seated sprints for my warmups, and so seated sprint, if I, like, let's, because I do this so regularly, I can tell right away if I'm going to have a good day or not, and if I should turn around and go home. So normally for my seated sprints, I will usually see about 16 to 1700 watts, peak power. If I see something like 15, I'm like, oh shit, I gotta go home. Or I'm just gonna spin easy and not do my sprints. If I see 18, I'm like, ooh, I might wanna try to knock out a PR today. But that's kinda how it goes. Like, I usually see a certain number and I'm like, okay, I'm okay. And if I feel good or if I feel better after doing one, I'm like, if that wasn't good, maybe I'll try one more, short, like five seconds. And if that's good, it means I just need it to open up a little bit, warm up a little bit, kind of get the patterning in my legs. But other than that, you know, if you're seeing an unusual drop in your sprint, it's probably time to go home. To that effect, one of the things that I do when People are coming back from like a period off or long period racing or sickness is one of the best little workouts to check how you feel. Just do some openers. Because if you're doing like, if you're doing a sort of generic set of openers of, yeah, like five, six minutes at FTP, couple of sprints, a wee bit of work over FTP, like sort of view to max sort of range, that's usually going to tell you how you feel all the way through it. and if you've had a period off the answer almost certainly is going to be not very good especially if you've been ill but you'll know the next few days whether like is that a case of I've opened up now and the openers helped with that or do I still feel cruddy and I felt cruddy during the openers in which case you're able to understand a little bit more about you know how things are actually feeling. Yeah and actually that That can actually tell you what you are allowed to train over the next couple days, potentially, as you keep recovering. Because my rule of thumb, I wasn't planning on putting this on the podcast, but fuck it, let's go for it. My rule of thumb in season that has yet to steer me wrong is don't ever pedal harder than feels good. So if you've got some VO2s planned and you start pedaling hard and you're like, oh, that sucked. Fucking stop. Go home. Stop pedaling. It doesn't feel good. The watts aren't good. You're probably not going to get much effect out of it. Or even if you are going to get some effect, you're carrying residual fatigue that you don't need. And all you're going to do is dig yourself deeper in the hole. And especially if FTP feels bad, usually that's a big red flag for me as a coach. Anyone that I coach that has done a block of VO2s will have seen my or had me say it to them. A little bit that I give them at the start of week three, basically stating there will be a point where you don't want to do anymore, and that is it, that's the end of the block. But, you know, that goes, you know, that goes for any sort of training you do, really. Like, one of the things I have to tell people in the opening call is, obviously, never... You never need to ask my permission to not do something. So if you, especially for like people who are outside of my own time zone, where, you know, I might not be able to tell you what to do immediately, like there's a descending priority there of, oh, if intervals don't feel good to do, just go do an endurance ride. If the endurance ride doesn't feel good to do, Try to recover. If that doesn't feel good, take the day off. If recovery right doesn't feel good, oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah. Like, don't force yourself to do anything that isn't going to start feeling good or end feeling good. Apart from VO2s, they never end feeling good. That's mostly true, yeah. All right, so what's your first don't? My first of two don'ts, because I've still not thought of a third, is... Don't assume you can just go another week without resting. This is something that you can maybe get away with once or twice every so often, but if you are looking at your plan for the next month or two and thinking, I can do an extra couple of races the following, we can delay the rest, that's when you're starting to get into that slippery slope of things catching up, and it might not be that you notice it. in the week that you decide to do a bit extra or even the recovery week afterwards. But you're going to get to the end of season and you're probably still going to be carrying a little bit extra fatigue that you didn't necessarily need to take into your goal events. I just thought of another don't that I'm going to give to you when we get to the end of our list. And you don't have one again because we're engaged in this instead of you thinking about it. Thinking. Okay, so... I'll give you a don't, is don't constantly do openers. Yep. One of the things that I see, not a ton, but frequently enough, where I think this needs noting. If you race, let's say, Saturday, Sunday, and then you take Monday off, and then you do a workout on Tuesday. I don't know why you would do a workout that Tuesday. It's probably going to suck, but Whatever. If you do a workout Tuesday, then you do a workout Wednesday. Thursday, you do a recovery. If you've got a race Saturday and you do Friday openers, why are you doing openers? Openers are to open the legs. You are probably tired from Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday going hard. And I would want you to rest on Friday going into your Saturday race. I had a coach say this to me a very long time ago. I still subscribe to this. He said, openers are privilege for the well-rested. And this sounds, this is so fucking cliche, but boy, that gets truer as the years go on. But like, no, it actually does. So don't constantly do openers if you feel like you need openers. And then again, some people don't ever need openers. I coach quite a few people where before they race, I want them coming in nice and fresh. I want them rested because that's where they race the best. And if we need openers, we're going to do as little as possible. So anyway, so yeah, that's my openers. There's a second part to that, I think, which is don't assume you need to do openers the day before. I more often than not give them two days before. Because quite often you see people do openers and then the next day say, I don't feel very good. And then the day after that they do. So like that's something to experiment with much in the same way we'd also recommend experimenting with how much intensity do you actually need to open up the legs. Some people, as you say, don't need openers until in which case their openers is just an endurance, right? Or less. Some people like. Katie, I think. Oh, Katie destroys herself. No, she does like an eight to ten minute max, like max, max effort. And I've had a handful of people where that's a good way to go, but most people are kind of in the middle. But yeah, I mean, even up to that, like Katie still needs rest up to that day, up to the openers, because you've got to recover from your training. Yeah, no, it's not, I'm going to go into my race as tired as possible. It's, I'm just going to do something really hard beforehand while fresh. And that's less common than I think a lot of people figure, because one of the things I've learned over the years also is that a lot of people who come to me and say, I feel like I need more training going into races. For some people, that is absolutely the case. Yeah. You need a week of solid training and then like a day or two of rest and then you're great on race day. Sure. Not everybody's like that. So a lot of the time I find that if somebody feels like they need to go harder before their race for openers, it usually means that they've been training really, really a little too hard. And they're always carrying a little extra fatigue because One of the things that seems to happen during openers, nobody, there's no literature, by the way, on openers, as far as I know, but it seems like when you are very fatigued, it takes the body longer to switch into, okay, I'm going to exercise now, because you're going from rest and digest to fight or flight, and when you are resting and digesting, It's harder to wake your body up. Like think about trying to wake somebody up from a nap. If they've been up for 48 hours straight, you try to wake them up after they've been asleep for 30 minutes, you are not getting them up. Your body's the very same way. If your body's beaten down and battered by training and racing, if you really feel like you need to hammer yourself silly to get your legs to open up, that may be a sign that you are just carrying way too much fatigue. Yep. No notes. Cool. Okay. All right. What's your second don't? My second don't is if you have a regular race schedule where you're only doing something at the weekend, which quite a lot of people end up doing, don't decide to spend your week doing hard intervals. because you probably need rest from the weekend before and you probably want to be fresh going into the weekend to come up. Now, there's opportunities to still do training in that sort of time but don't assume that you've got Tuesday, Wednesday and or Thursday to just decide to go smash it a bit because it's not going to be constructive in the long term in all likelihood and you're only going to screw up. your next race. And if you're doing this a lot, you're only going to screw up yourself. Yeah. And actually, that's where like having a good estimate for your FTP and your TTE and your sprint and all those other good things, like knowing what your standard performances are in terms of these numbers that vary typically very little week to week and month to month, especially like FTP. FTP is one of the most static numbers in training unless you are getting more fit. Which is great. Let's see it go up. If it's going down, chances are it's fatigue. And knowing what that kind of standardized performance is for yourself, being able to watch that will give you a good idea of how much fatigue you are really carrying or not. And so when you are going to train, Always touching on these things, knowing what a good performance and a bad performance looks like from yourself, that will tell you a lot about whether you are okay to train. Because especially if you are doing VO2s, like, oh, I'm just going to do VO2s at like 105% of FTP. Like, okay, but unless you are going to failure and you know where your limits are, you can do that pretty fucking tired a lot of the time. and it may not be the most productive session and you should probably take a rest day. So that's what I'm saying. Having an idea of your standardized performance, what's regular for you when training, if you're not hitting at least X number or whatever metric you have, that's a good sign that you're fatigued. Rory, you're still muted. Also motivation. Also motivation. As that dips, it's usually a good sign that you need a bit more of a break. Yeah. I've had a couple clients where their performances will just keep getting better the more they train and race. And I will have to rest them preemptively because some people just respond really, really, really well to just constant battering. And that's cool. Yeah, you too. But preemptive rest. Helps. The other thing, though, is that, like you mentioned, motivation, there can be a lot of signs off-bike. Like, if your partner says you're getting really grumpy these days, and you're like, my performances are great, I don't want to keep training, you're probably carrying a lot of fatigue, and that's affecting your mental state. And I've had a couple clients... So, if your performances aren't great, that's usually a sign. Rory's winking, I think he means sexual performances. But yes, that's a sign too. Lowered sex drive is also an indicator. It can also be low iron or something like that, but yeah, that can happen. I've had a couple clients where they'll just start complaining in their training piece comments. They'll be like, I don't know why I'm doing this anymore. And whenever I see something like that, I'm like, oh, okay, rest time. And that's the first indicator for them. So yeah, so watch out for yourself. All right, my next don't is don't expect much progression in season. Unless you have an extremely light racing schedule, and I mean light like once a month or something like that, you can easily train around once a month and keep progressing. But if you are racing somewhat frequently, odds are that the energy it takes to go race and to have decent race fitness depending on your personal goals or maybe your team goals for you if you are a pro or semi-pro, then usually when you are not racing it becomes a question of maintaining and trying to shed off residual fatigue as much as possible. So the racing will be kind of unfocused. Training in a way. When you're racing, you're kind of doing FTP work, you're kind of doing VO2s, you're kind of doing sprint work, depending on the course, or some of it's just like nothing but sprints if you're in a hard crit or whatever. So the racing is hard, but it's kind of unfocused. And so if you are racing a lot, don't expect your TTE to go out, maybe unless you're doing just gravel races or something like that. Don't expect your VO2 max to go up a lot of the time. Don't expect your FTP to go up. You will probably, when you have rested fully, you will probably see your anaerobic capacity go up, but that's really about it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to keep training and progressing in season, because if you keep doing that in order to keep your performances moving up, chances are you're going to start backsliding because of the fatigue. So you've really got to strike this balance for yourself. So actually, Rory, let me ask you this, because I've got a kind of a scheme in my head about a way to structure training and racing if somebody's got like two or three weeks between races. And they're kind of important races, but like, let's say between two B races, you got race weekend, race weekend, weekend off, race weekend. How are you structuring things around that? So, obviously, it will depend on what kind of races they are, but ideally, you're trying to, what this question basically is, is how do I peak for one week, and then keep that peak two weeks later? Oh, not even peaking, I mean, just like, let's say these are all B races, and they're like legit B races, okay, B race, B race, then let's say three or four weeks after that second B race, you've got an A race. Okay. I mean, you're going into that B race, You're going into both those B races thinking, okay, these are probably going to reflect what I want to do in my A race. So it's about trying to work out what's deficient in the first B race that you could then improve on before the next one. Is it that you need a bit more top-end power? Okay, in which case you've probably got an opportunity in between races to get in two, if you're a very experienced racer, maybe three workouts that could contribute towards your next. Rays, is it that you're getting to the end of the race and you still don't feel quite as fresh as you probably could, powers down, you're seeing a decline in peak watts as you go, maybe it's an FTP problem, it could just be a TTE problem, go test it. Or fatigue. Or fatigue, yeah. Ideally you're going into that first race knowing whether or not you're fresh enough to... that TTE and FTP are both where they should be. But maybe it's the case that you just need to do a little bit of maintenance work. You don't need to really work on the top end all that much. Maybe the first race goes absolutely perfect and you think, I don't need to work on anything. I just need to make sure I get through the next B race and onto my goal event. In which case, work out what's the thing that's going to keep you motivated most? What's the thing that's going to help you work on this most? And that could be very variable. It could just be that you need to spend the next period of time doing some endurance, adding no intensity whatsoever, just keeping the legs ticking over. You're not quite fully recovering. You're just letting it be like that very long, slow recovery where you're letting the intensity get out your legs, but you're otherwise staying very active, keeping volume up. Question for you, because I think a lot of people say intensity, but we should define intensity. at this point. Anything over endurance, right? Okay, because I was going to say anything over like sweet spot or FTP. Yeah, you could also go that way. I'm thinking it mainly from the perspective of if you're going to do something like sweet spot or FTP, we could distinguish between a maintenance workout versus a progression workout, in which case a maintenance workout I wouldn't think of as intensity because you're not going to any sort of exhaustion. If you decide, oh, it's not a fatigue problem, but we do want to bring TTE up a bit more, that is an intensity day, because you're bringing yourself to a limit to try and adapt from it. So, okay. So that's almost the question I asked. But I'll finish it off, because I think you talked about the content. I was thinking about more of the structure. So what I would do is I would have somebody probably rest to recovery rides for like maybe two to four days after their first B race weekend. Let's say they like do openers, like hard openers Friday, easy endurance Saturday, race Sunday, race is long and hard. Let's say you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, your recovery ride, you're feeling pretty good. Then you've got Thursday, then what do you do through the weekend and then between the next week? So a lot of the time, that's where I would say you probably want between Thursday, and the next Monday. So you got Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, where you could do two, maybe three hard workouts, but most likely two really hard workouts, if you're feeling good, and one maintenance workout, like we already said, not going to failure. And so depending on what you need to maintain, a lot of the time this is going to be FTP. And this is actually sometimes where I would shorten FTP intervals. If somebody can do normally three by 20, and that's their normal workout that they've progressed to, If they're a little tired, I'll say, give me 2x15, give me 3x10. Half of a normal dose should feel fine, should feel better by the end of it. But then after that, yeah, it's just like you, I would say, what do we need to work on? Because while you are kind of fresh, and we're not eyeballs deep into the race season yet, what do we need to work on? Let's figure this out. Do you need more top end? Do you need more capacity? Do you need more endurance? and that will decide what gets put in those days. You're still muted. I'm not muted. Oh, you were. I swear to God. Okay. Who's next? Me or you? I've said both of mine, I think. Oh, okay. All right. Okay. All right. I'll give you a third and then I'll give Rory, I'll give you your third. Actually, yeah, okay, well, my third was going to be don't do too many hard workouts, especially around races. So, like, I usually think about a race having a blast radius. Like, before the race and after the race in the calendar, we're looking at this timeline going, okay, you need to freshen up a little bit going into this race, and after this race, you probably need to recover. Depending on the duration and intensity of the race, it may be very short, it may be very long. It's like a Venn diagram of intensity. You don't want anything to overlap with it. More or less, yeah. I would say... That's going to be my next very rare Instagram post. The Venn diagram of intensity. I would say that's not a perfect analogy, but I'll let it slide for now. Alright, so my last one is actually... Reduced performance, and we kind of already touched on this, reduced performance does not necessarily mean that you need more training. And this is probably the thing that I think people probably do the most. As they see themselves starting to fatigue, they see their numbers starting to go down, or they start feeling not quite as strong. And they're like, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to double down. I was doing two hard workouts a week. I'm going to do three. No, I'm going to do four. I'm going to do a double day, then two hard days, and then I'm going to race in the weekend too. I need to double down on this training because I'm not working hard enough. Hole in black. Roulette. Oh, like, oh, a gamble. Yeah. Oh, no, it's not even a gamble. Like, it's just not going to go well. It's just taking your money and flashing it down the toilet. Yeah, like combo. Okay, fair enough. Well, in gambling, sometimes you do, okay, sometimes that does go okay, but way more rarely than it goes well. So, actually, that reminds me, I've got a big notes file on, you know, beginning, intermediate, and advanced training mistakes, and this is going to go, give me an idea for, this is going to go under there. So, yeah. So reduced performance does not necessarily mean needing more training. So especially if your race load has been somewhat high and your training load has been very high or moderately high, at least, along with racing, chances are your reduced performance is a sign of fatigue. And so one of the things I would suggest people watch for is Soreness, muscular soreness. So like if you are going upstairs, and I know cyclists hate stairs in general, but like if it's worse than usual, if you are dreading every single step and your legs are screaming at you, or let's say you're like taking off from a stoplight and you're accelerating and it feels worse. than usual in those big motor units, that's also a big sign that you need rest. That's a sign of fatigue. It's a huge sign of fatigue. And again, this will go back to don't pedal any harder than feels good. So if you don't feel good doing that, but you feel okay doing endurance riding, endurance riding is okay. If you feel okay doing FTP, FTP is okay. If you feel like shit doing VO2s, all right, don't do VO2s. But if you feel good doing VO2s, chances are you don't have a lot of fatigue. But you've got to be honest with yourself, because this is something where people will lie to themselves, and I've also seen them lie to their coaches. I'm not going to add anybody here, but you know who you are. So, any notes on that one, Rory? No, completely agree. So, Rory's last one. Rory, this is very, very smart of you to bring this one up. Thanks. Which is... I am so impressed. Which is, don't think that your usual routine applies to every race. So, some races, you may need openers, some races you may not. Some races, you may have done the exact same thing going into one race that you have done going into another in the exact same conditions, and you get to like two days out from the race and you think, I'm still tired. Maybe I shouldn't do openers. Maybe I should rest more? Should I still go do openers? So there's a lot of stuff, life stress especially, work stress, all these things will pile up and make you decide, do I need to do my usual thing or should I deviate from my routine? Yeah, when I came up with this one, I have a client who raced this weekend. who we wanted to toy around with whether or not harder openers would work for them. And so they did their openers on Thursday, race was on Saturday. But instead of doing the openers, they had a local crit near them. So I said, go for it, just don't kill yourself doing it. And then it seems on Saturday they had really good legs. But they didn't go into that crit on the Thursday aiming to blow themselves up. They didn't, you know, they didn't do openers for the openers, as it were. You can use your races in a lot of different ways like this. That's why we started this talking about A, B and C races and how to prioritize. I don't think anyone should be going into a C race doing openers. That's not why the C race is there. You're not turning up there to do well and you shouldn't kid yourself that that's what you're there for. Yeah, I will also add to your very excellent points that you can change year to year also. Because I work with some people whose needs for fitness maintenance change drastically as they get better trained. And I actually had one of my guys recently say like, hey, I've done this many less hours this year than I did the year before. Like, I haven't trained as much up to this point as I did last year. What's up with that? And I said, well, you're more fit. I decided that you needed more rest. And, well, none of that, the work schedule took care of some of that in terms of giving him forced rest. But it's gone really well. I've given him a little less riding over the time. We've done some harder efforts, some harder focused efforts, done a couple new things. and it's all gone really well but all the harder stuff required more rest so a lot of the time as you go your needs will change and you have to not be wedded to certain things that worked well for you last year or the year before or the year before or have even worked well for you for like the last 10 years maybe you try something new and you get more fit and you need to change your game plan up and you're you know you're 10 years into a racing career and You suddenly go, oh, maybe I should rest more into races. This seems to be working okay for me. That's okay too. You've really got to make sure that you are using the knowledge you have in the best way as possible, but also knowing that you are probably going to make an handful of mistakes and that's okay. As long as you learn from it, it was not wasted effort. I'd say the same goes for coaches as well. Like adapt your methods, how you apply them, what you look for in athletes. Like you mentioned at the start, like some proprietary charts that I haven't used all that much since you sent them to me. But like part of the reason why we developed some of those is to try and find new ways to get information out of athletes that they are themselves incapable of giving us because it's all the... Physiological stuff that we don't really fully understand how to just talk about. Like, what's an FTP improvement, actually? That sort of question. So, like, there's an awful lot from the coaching side of things. And again, yeah, as for self-coach athletes, like, understand that how you train can and probably should evolve over time. Like, if you're Locked in your basement doing sweet spot for nine months of the year. It's probably not going to work out every single year, but it might work in that first one, but you're going to have to do something different eventually. Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's one of the big reasons that people come to us with consultation stuff is like, I'd say a fair percentage of people is like, what I've been doing has stopped working. And, you know, there's a couple things that we, you know, I'll look at their training and say, hey, you should try this, you should try this, you should try this. And none of it's a guarantee, but, you know, I, you know, it's aiming to give people more tools to use to, to kind of like try to break through what has been going wrong with them. And, you know, and I'd say probably half of those, I look at their files, and I just tell them right up, you need more rest. and they're like, man, I've given this guy money for this. So sometimes you got to pay somebody to tell you the obvious and to make you actually take the rest because yeah, it really works. So sorry, folks. When I speak to randos on the internet, one of the things that I've started doing a lot more when people are like, why am I getting fitter? Is asking them, what have you done to get fitter? Because Nine times out of ten, I think it is just as likely that you have not actually done anything to move the needle compared to, you know, what could actually do it. And an awful lot of that is stuck in a rut of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Or maybe not understanding, you know, there's another avenue of what it is you're able to do. Quite frequently cite that first podcast I was on about training. I was going to say, we did a podcast on that. Yeah. But one of the things we talked about, I'm pretty sure in that podcast, is about changing things up from time to time and making sure that your training reflects not everything that has to be done on a bike. Grand Tour Climber doesn't need to practice their sprint unless they're planning to finish up against Pugacar. But, you know, you need to have that broad array where you try and hit everything, because if you hit everything, you're going to see some improvement somewhere, and maybe that place that you hit is going to be the thing that moves the needle, because you've never really done it properly before. It's why, like, the really concentrated Vultimac stuff works for a lot of people. is because when do you ever tax yourself like that in such a horrid fashion? Equally, though, maybe you don't need to do it in one concerted walk. Maybe you stretch it out over a long period of time. But an awful lot of people that end up wondering why I'm not getting fitter. They're not questioning themselves like that, and I think a lot of people would do a lot better if they just asked themselves the same questions that we would, and I can promise everyone in advance that the questions we'll ask is, what have you done that makes you think you'll get fitter, and when's the last time you took a race? Always going back to those basics. All right, you want to get to some Instagram questions before we head out of here? All right. Oh, okay. Well, we already got to this one, but... Let's tackle that anyway. Is it better to add easy volume or intensity between race weekends? I actually know a lot of people, both athletes and coaches, who really like to add high intensity between race weekends. And I think one of the big reasons is that if you miss doing these things, you feel like they can kind of taper off. And one of the things Like you're missing, oh, I got to do some maintenance of my VO2 max. I got to do some VO2 max intervals between these races. Or I'm racing hard, I got to do hard intervals to keep myself used to doing hard intervals. I think part of that actually comes back to what I mentioned earlier about people needing to really bludgeon themselves with hard efforts to keep their legs open. Because otherwise, your body starts to decide, oh, I'm fucked. I really need to rest, and it starts to shut it down. And if you go two or three days, and you feel horrible, and you're like, man, I gotta get some hard efforts in my legs, chances are that's your body trying to take a goddamn rest. So take a goddamn rest. What's wrong with that? Anyway, sorry. A little small rant. Yeah, if your races are four days apart, you can maybe get away with doing a set of easy 30-30s. Submax, yeah, like 8 out of 10, 7 out of 10. Not the all outs, sort of, yeah. The sort of thing that you could do, like, for 45 minutes. And that's mainly, you know, again, that's just, like, it's another version of openers. It's just, you were already open from the race you did already. You're just trying to keep yourself at that peak for that little bit more. But the price you pay for that is you need to rest after the next event. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, so that's why having standardized performances and watching for signs of fatigue are going to help everybody. Next question is, can I have my cake and eat it too? Can I be both fit and well-rested for, the answer is yes, so far, asterisk, for large parts of this season. So, what is being fit and well-rested? That's a taper into an A race. Can you do that for large parts of the season? No, sadly, you cannot. You can do the perma-fit thing, but you just need to understand that you're not getting to a peak. Yeah. Like, your peak is, like, what are the different bits of Everest? People go up, like, there's base camp, and then there's, like, another two or three before you get to the top. Oh, then there's, like, the depth zone. You're getting to number two. Yeah, you're going to number two. And you're hanging out there. You're still going to have to have a rest at the end of the season. That's non-negotiable. But just understand that if you want to do it that way, you're just never going to be actually at your best. Yeah. All right. Next question is, when is a mid-season break a good idea? Should you plan one or will your body let you know it's time? So we already discussed this in that You had suggested people plan it out and don't fuck with it. I think that's a good approach. However, I think if you have several places where you think you could take a rest, I think you should plan out your decision-making tree before you get to those places to decide, is it going to be this bit where I can rest, or is it going to be this bit where I can rest? Because if you take a rest block mid-season, Odds are you're going to lose a little bit of fitness, but you are going to reap the rewards of being fresh and ready to train and motivated to race, and it's going to take very little time for your fitness to build back. But a lot of the time, you do have to build it back a little bit. Actually, for some people, for some people, I'd say it's probably 50-50 or 60-40, something like that, where people will get more fit after their rest. I've worked with a couple people where No matter what we do, after we build up their A race, after their A race, they take a week, week and a half, something like that to kind of like chill and get back to normal. Then they set some like really, really big numbers, but they are not fit enough to race at that point. And so it's like we now have a new level of fitness that you've recovered to from all the training and the racing. And now, your next A race will have that as your baseline level of fitness. And that, for some people, that is a reliable thing that I've seen happen, like, over the course of a couple years. It's rare, but it happens, for sure. But most of the time, I'd say, yeah, you will get, after you're back to riding, like, one to two, maybe even up to three weeks at the most, you're going to be right back to where you were, especially if you are giving yourself proper rest and you are not training. Too stupidly. Yeah, I'd recommend that if you get to the point where your body's, like, crying out for a rest, then you've left it too long. Unless it's after, like, first A race of the season, which is, yeah, you don't expect to feel good after that, probably. But if you're surfing C and B races, and then your A race is at, like, end of September. and you feel tired at any point in that, you probably should have rested earlier. And that's fine, just learn from it in future. All right, next question is, how can you tell if less than optimal race legs is due to too much racing or too little racing? How are you defining race legs? Like feeling good? Finishing where you expected. Okay, actually, this is a really good question because in my opinion, race legs, the way most people would think about it, I think is feeling good with repeated surging. So the surges feel good and doing them repeatedly and for sometimes extended periods feels pretty good. Like you still have a limit, but it's not like, you know, you get to the limit and it's not like you're dying. It's like, oh, my legs gave out. I'll sit in the pack for a minute, I'll recover, then I'll be able to go again. So I think of those as race legs. So I would say if you have been racing somewhat frequently, like let's say somewhat frequently, it's something like every other week you're racing. If you, after, if like early season especially, this is a layup, like It's chances are you don't have enough racing in the legs. For some people, that's fine. Some people can do regular training and get to their racing. They're great. But a lot of time, early season, I was like this when I was racing is it always took me probably somewhere between four to six races, like practice crits and stuff like that to really feel like I had race legs on me. And then like mid-summer, like somewhere between like June and July, I felt Awesome Racing. And then, August, September, not feeling so awesome anymore. Having some good days, but... Yeah, as well. So the later you go into the season... Oh, sorry, go ahead, Rory. This delay is screwing us. It's what we talked about earlier with previous Roglic. Like, part of the reason he's going to the Dauphiné is not just to, like, feel out his fitness and get a couple of early wins on the board and build morale. It's the tempo of sitting in a bunch. Like, tempo of going up a mountain, he can probably do just about any time he wants, because that's what he's good at. But the tempo of counterattacks, attacking himself, like, coping with the stress of, like, traffic furniture and everything else. Like, that's why those races exist in the calendar for pro cyclists. That's where, like, that's why I think of Israel's legs. It's going in and... Expecting to be able to do the pattern of racing, whatever kind of racing it is. It's sort of intermittent stuff you're talking about. There's like really applicable to like crits. If you are a time trialist, then it, you know, that's a rare instance where the race itself reflects the training almost one-to-one. But... Race legs for a time trial is more about what you do off the bike beforehand, like dialing in, warm up, knowing what you're going to wear, what equipment are you taking for that race. So it can vary quite a bit according to what you do. What would it be for a track sprinter telling jokes to each other on the chairs before you start? And eating snacks, yeah. It's hard life. Eating snacks, lying down. Yeah, so I think other than that, odds are, for me, I would have to look at your training and racing schedule for two minutes, and I would be able to tell you, maybe in the last 30 seconds. But a lot of the time, I think, especially if it's mid-season, if your race legs are not quite there, a lot of the time, it's just that you've been You need more rest. I'll also mention this. This has happened a couple times in the last couple of years, is check your bike fit. Your saddle or seat post may have slid, your bars may have slid, and that may be putting you in a weird position, and that can also amount to fatigue. So double check that, just cover your basics. But anyway, next question is, training around C and A races, well understood, but by the self-coached, what about B events. Okay, so Rory's laughing. He's on mute again. I think the cat was meowing or something like that. Not on mute. The cat is meowing. She's much quieter. You know the people love it. We kind of already answered this question. We kind of did, but I actually wanted to approach this in a different way of like what to expect around a B event and why. You won't have great legs around a B event, because I think this may actually answer this question, because we kind of answered it already, but I think we can actually be a little more direct about the nature of a B event. So the nature of a B event, I would say, let's say you've got four to six months of build to your A event, and you've got your periodization plan, you've got your endurance riding, your VO2s, your FTP, your race efforts, and tapering and racing, your A race, where you hope to do well. Along the way, when you have yourself a mini taper into a B race, at that point, you don't have the depth of training, or you haven't trained everything that you need to train yet. And I think that is probably one of the things that would keep somebody from having their best likes at a B event. So I think that may be something that is good to consider a B event for is like, I want to do okay, but I recognize that I haven't done the full gamut of training I need to this point. And that, I think, might be the right way to think about a B event. Are you on the same page with me? No? Yeah, I mean, like, the worst case scenario is you go into it and you feel... Truly Dreadful, in which case there's something completely different you need to work out, probably rest. Question I'd ask you off the back of this is, what would you do if someone went in and felt the best they'd ever had in their B race? I would hope they feel better at their A race. So, okay, so actually let's put this in larger context. So if somebody feels their best in a B race and they feel worse in their A race, that would make me think that somebody needs less to get in shape for their A race than they think they need. And they probably did too much or too hard training heading into their A race. Because at some point when you're tapering down and you're really putting your best legs on, actually, well, for some of my clients, there's... There's really no taper. They have their best races on the back of just building for three or four straight weeks. But for anybody who's not those folks, when you are getting into that A race, a lot of the time, if you are... What's that phrase? I live in North Carolina now, so I should start learning these Southern phrases. The something barn. The hay is in the barn. There you go. At some point, the hay is in the barn. As in, there's no more cramming with training you can do because the amount of training you have to do to move the needle is too much and it's going to create too much fatigue and you're not going to recover from it by the time you get to your A race. Does all that make sense? Yeah. Okay. So what's your answer? I would think along the similar line to you of initial worry of, okay, leading up to this, what have we done and have we peaked too early? And then it has to be looking ahead to where the A-raise actually sits and working out how do we make sure that we are still at or close to this peak come that event? And part of that is probably going to be I would lean towards not overdoing it. So stripping out a lot of the intensity days, if we can, if there's a bunch of B races still to come between now, then maybe that's the only intensity and we're just surfing the good vibes. Because the fortunate part of a peak is you can surf it for quite a bit, as long as you've not got too much going on in that time. I find that you can keep someone at more or less a good peak for a few weeks. Two, three. Ideally, yeah. Ideally, not more than a month. Once you're there, if your A-race is coming up a month from now, you kind of have to think, okay, can we quickly recover and then build back up again and hope that we get to that same point? Because I'm not confident that we can surf that. all the way through to whatever ends up being month, two months, wherever it is. Yeah, and I think that there's two things at play here in terms of losing a peak that make it impossible, like physically impossible to maintain. One of them is that when you are in really, really good shape, you can destroy yourself really hard. You can dig that hole deeper than you thought, like I'm in the US right now, I could dig that hole to Australia when I'm in really, really good shape. And in fact, one day I did. I was doing match sprints and I had to chase this guy for three laps. He went right from the gun. And I did 750 meter TT. It was the hardest I had ever gone at that point in my life. And I was absolutely wrecked for the, I lost it by half a wheel, by the way. And so I was wrecked for the rep round, which I won only because the other two guys were not quite as fast as me at that time. One of them got a lot faster. And the other thing that happened was I was fucked for my kilo. It was like the day – it was one or two days after that. I had already done it. And that guy who won, he went out to the next round. He got wrecked. Like it wasn't even close for his next round because he was fucked too. So anyway, so you can really dig that hole deep. And I find this with my clients too is like sometimes – If you go really, really hard for enough races, you can need a week off the bike and then another month to rebuild, depending on how hard you went. Oh, the other thing is that you're not doing the training as much while you are in peak shape. Your volume isn't as high because necessarily your fitness is going to maintain for a little bit as you are resting. and just maintaining for these big races. But because you're not doing that much training, your form starts to decay a little bit. And it takes a little bit for you to realize it. But at some point, between the fatigue of going hard and not really doing much training, that's why you cannot maintain a peak. Be clear, it means form in terms of how well you're racing, not Strava's name for TSB. I did not know Strava had a TSB. Okay. Then yes, what Rory said. Next question is... Oh, we don't have that many. Okay, cool. How to make sure you get enough rest when you also need big volume to feel strong? Those aren't mutually exclusive things. True. I mean, you can... You can hit a 20-hour, we can still get plenty of rest. Yeah. I think that there's a couple things at play. Actually, the person asking this has been, I know he's been sick several times this season. So he's, you know, well, I don't want to give away too much. But let's say, generally speaking, preempt your rest. And I think a lot of the time, especially when somebody does somewhat big volume, like 20 plus hours regularly, especially if you're not training with that much intensity, usually you can go a little longer with that than a lot of people who train with a lot of hard intervals. And necessarily doing a lot of volume, you have to do fewer intervals anyway. always err on the side of more rest days, because especially if you like long rides, more rest days doesn't go out of fashion, and you can do two long rides in a week and get plenty of rest, as opposed to, you know, doing a bunch of like three or four hour rides through the entire week and never getting a rest day. I.e. my current training plan. Your current training plan, yes, Rory is exemplary. Actually, Rory, why don't you tell me a little bit more about your training plan, because I have no idea what you're doing for riding. I'm just having fun socialising with people again, having moved back to Glasgow, where my club actually was, and not Edinburgh, where it definitely wasn't. Funnily enough, your long distance track sprint effort was similarly replicated by me on Tuesday in the group ride, where, I've already told Cole this, but there's a track sprinter that turns up to one of the group rides, and, oh boy, Is it horrible chasing a track sprinter, even when it's a course that's like 20 minutes long? It's just a complete cheat code. Well, as a, well, I haven't really trained or competed in a while, but as a, if I were to race track sprinter myself, I can tell you that he's not a pure sprinter in the way that I would think about him. He's what you would call a sprint duro. in the, you know, kind of like in the Ed Clancy kind of vein of things, where big aerobic power, but also really, really big sprint watts too. Like, like if Andre Greipel ever raced on the track, he would have been on Sprint Duro, you know? So, all right. Last question is, oh, we've already done this. How long can you hit peak form for? I'm guessing the answer will be, it depends. Two to four weeks. Sometimes, if you go really hard in your big race, one to four weeks. Basically, rewind five minutes. Yeah. All right, so. Ten minutes to account for the ADHD round. Yeah, ten minutes being the length of the podcast people think that this will be. No, we actually spent ten minutes preparing for this. That's why it's 10-Minute Tips. I think I've said that before. People have asked me many times. No, it's kind of a joke because it started out as 10-minute podcasts way back in the day. Now that's how long we spend preparing for them because sometimes the off-the-cuff kind of semi-planned conversation is a lot more fun than something that's... done to a much more rigid outline like a Wattstock. So I thought that this would be a lot of fun, and this has been really fun, Rory. Thank you for coming on to the podcast, and do you have any last thoughts before we wrap this up? As usual, rest. All right, rest. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. If you want to reach out for coaching, empiricalcycling at gmail.com. If you want to consult with us, too, we are open for that as well. And if you'd like to support the podcast, empiricalcycling.com slash donate is where you can toss us a donation. Thank you for all of those, by the way. And if you would like to give us a nice rating where you listen to podcasts, we will take all the nice ratings you want. and reviews, nice reviews, all go a long way. And word of mouth, thanks so much for the recommendations, everybody. We really, really thank you for listening and I hope all of your fitness maintenance in season gets a lot better and if you want to ask a question for the podcast, go follow me on Instagram, Adam Pulford Cycling and we will see you again later.