In an exchange of e-mails yesterday, one of my teammates asked me “So what do trackies do when they can’t get on the velodrome to train?” The more I thought about the question, the more interesting it became to me.
As a match sprinter, it makes life hard to not have a velodrome. It’s very difficult to replicate the types of training that sprinters do without being able to get on some type of long, level surface. Even if you can find 1-2 kilometers of level road, you can’t recreate the effects of the banking and turns on acceleration, and these were some of the things that I considered when I changed my focus to the 1 kilometer time trial, also known as the “Kilo.”
Training for the kilo without a track is still difficult – the main problem being the difficulty in gauging progress. Want to know how much you’ve improved? There are several ways you can gauge your progress on the velodrome, and the most complicated thing needed is a stopwatch. Doing this on the road is a different story, which is why I’ve been travelling to events that have a Kilo as one of the races – not necessarily to be competitive, but to gauge my progress.
In addition to the roadwork (both on a fixed gear bike as well as my road bike), there’s about 3-6 hours of trainer work each week. Why the trainer (or rollers – I use those too)? Primarily it lets you focus on the effort without having to worry about extraneous factors like the wind, traffic, that dog that likes to eat you shoe. It is also repetitive – riding the trainer or the rollers at a set speed at a set resistance will reproduce the same power requirements each time. The faster you go, the more you’ve progressed. The rollers are also, when a wind resistance unit is added, highly comparable to actually getting out and riding. Including the falling! Though when you fall off your rollers, there’s usually more embarrassment than road rash.
Workouts, both on the road or on the trainer, focus on interval efforts. Most people hate doing intervals, but if you’re a serious track rider, there’s no substitute. Intervals help you work on leg speed and suppleness, your recovery from a hard effort, as well as increased power output both for a short time frame and a longer effort. Most of my interval workouts on the trainer last about 1.5 hours, and involve a lot of sweat, especially now that summer is on it’s way to Georgia, where I live. Here’s a picture my wife snapped of me at the end of tonight’s workout. I feel like I went swimming – only in hot water!
So does that answer your question, Ray?
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