deck of cards training for bike racing one day at a time



If you are serious about getting a coach. Please read the article below...... Every coach and rider is different. I am not for everyone and everyone is not for me, but everyone will train and race better with the right coach.




DECK OF CARDS

by: sam krieg

A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it.
-Ely Culbertson-


Training in the winter for bike racing is a brutal activity that very few people can comprehend. Hours spent suffering quietly so you emerge in the spring ready to race and brawl against all of your rivals and your mental demons. Our past racing results and failures are what motivate us daily on our winter-long pilgrimage of torture and torment. Living here in Idaho I have the choice to either go outside and brave the elements or suffer for hours on the trainer. Neither are very pleasant but both are essential. Each and every one of my winter training experiences builds a foundation for the coming road season. The one thing I know for sure is that the harder and longer I train the more indestructible I become. Recently while surfing the internet I came across a cycling blog that had a great quote “train so you can make yourself harder to kill.” On my way down into the basement to train the same day I picked up a new deck of playing cards from a shelf. I opened the box and took out the promotional cards from the deck. I easily ripped them in half and tossed them in the trash. There were 54 cards left. It struck me that this particular workout which I was dreading was just one card in a deck of many. That doesn’t mean that the particular workout didn’t have value. What it meant was this workout was one opportunity for me to “stack my deck” for road season. Today’s training might create the 1 second gap I will need later on the top of a climb or to win a TT. Today’s workout might also crush me and make we re-think why I do this sport. To be completely honest most of my workouts do a bit of both.
I was now sitting on the trainer and I tried to tear the entire deck in half. It was impossible for me. I have seen a You-Tube video where a guy ripped a phonebook in half so I know it is possible. But, I have also seen Fabian Cancellara time trial at 50k an hour and I can’t do that either. The 2 promotional cards I threw away were easy to tear. They took a few watts at most. To destroy the deck was going to take some power that I do not yet possess, and to time trial at close to 50kph is going to take a bit more work. Both the phone book ripper and Cancellara the T.T. ripper could literally destroy my personal deck of cards.
Thinking back to last year’s road season I realized that the epic winter of training I had done allowed me to do the same thing on a different level. I certainly didn’t become world class or star in my own You-Tube video, but I did have a few magical days on the bike. My deck of cards was definitely more robust than some of the guys I was racing, and in a few cases I was able to simply destroy a few others who in the past have destroyed me. I had moved myself up in the hierarchy and created a few lackey’s along the way. If you think of a field of bike racers like a bunch of playing cards this starts to be a valid training theory. As a whole the field is a vicious monster. Just like a full deck of cards…. It is hard to rip it in half. But during the race you have many opportunities to play the game and manipulate it in your favor. If you can’t climb and the race finishes on a hill you better get in a break, if you can climb don’t panic you can win from the break or the field. Just like in any form of gambling if you want to win, you have to be prepared to lose. The great thing about bike racing is you can win even if you are not the strongest; you just have to know how to play the game to optimize your strengths. Here’s the trick: don’t handicap yourself by not coming to the race prepared. If you were dropped the year before on the climb you better show up lean and ready to rumble. You have all winter to prepare. Don’t waste the opportunity. Every time you train you have a chance to “stack your deck.” If you do it right you will eventually be strong enough to survive even the most desperate of moments.
We train hard “day in and out” with the goal of becoming a winner. In the short run you might lose a ton. You will have some terrible workouts and results. These losses will test you more than any good workout or race you have ever had. Bad wattage during a workout or test is the best medicine in the long term. Training hard will make you more consistent. The more consistent you become the more durable you will be. I don’t have the highest 5 minute or 20 minute power. But I race well almost every weekend and I can sustain my peak wattages on a regular basis regardless if it is at mile 10 or mile 100. Just like everyone I struggle early in races when everyone is fresh. But after a few hours I start to feel like a beast. I often can make up my own rules late in the race. It is like ¾ of the deck is gone. Now I am playing with just a few racers and that is when the real game begins and I know there will be 4 face cards and a joker left. All 5 have a shot to win, but often it is the rider who pulls the ace from his or her back pocket who wins the race. Last year I remember racing to the KOM against a particular racer who I for sure thought I was going to beat. We had gapped almost 100+ racers and I was definitely riding at a new PEAK 5 minute power. We were 10 meters from the KOM line. He stood up and humiliated me. In just 10 meters he shredded my deck of cards. That experience is definitely one I will not forget, I didn’t have a bad day or bad legs….his (better) was just better than mine.
This makes me think about the past 7 years of training and racing. Over those 7 years I have had a ton of good and bad moments. I have 2000+ power files and every one of them tells a story, and they all make me a bit harder to kill. I realize now that my current fitness is a sum of those 7 years. They enable me to survive hard training sessions day after day. At times they have allowed me to ride the break into pieces and occasionally they have dealt me the sweetest hand.
A racer doesn’t have to look much further than Cadel Evans to find inspiration to fight for an entire season. Evans came up short all season for every one of his goals. He had an awful Tour de France and Vuelta. I am sure his team was about to fire him! But, he his deck was so stacked that he knew he had an ace left in his pocket. Evans won the world championship by holding his cards close and playing the game until the very last deal. He could have easily packed it in for the season and stopped racing. But, like all good addicts, he couldn’t stop gambling. He knew that he was ridiculously fit and just needed a few things to go his way. That day at the world championships is proof that you can’t win…if you don’t play.
Even the bad workouts and races have a place in my deck. If you notice there are a lot more plain cards with numbers than ones with pretty pictures. The pretty pictures are the rare cards. They can win you tons of money in Vegas or in the back room of a smoky bar. They are the cards you wish you were dealt every day. But to be honest what fun would gambling be if you won every time? It is in the losing and stress of losing that makes winning such a cool experience. Training is just like that. If your goal was to always feel good on your bike and to always win you wouldn’t have gotten into bike racing. You would have just done “tours” and your local group rides. You would search out events where you were the strongest and just crush people. That would be like going to Vegas and betting a penny.
So as you sit on your trainer or ride in the freezing cold I want you to think of your ride today as just one card. This one ride will not make you a PRO or win you a national championship. This card is just one in a deck of many. The larger you make the deck the harder you will be to destroy. This one ride is part of what will make you the beast in the breakaway that rides everyone’s legs off. This one card is the 1 second that will win or lose you a time trial. Don’t expect every ride to be perfect. Don’t be shocked when the watts are awful. Be excited when things go your way because you know that the cards will be against you at some point and this success will help. Think about riding hard 54 times before you expect to see great fitness gains. That is 52 hard training sessions and 2 jokers before you expect to improve. A few good workouts will not win you races. You need tons of good and bad rides before you truly become an excellent bike racer. You will learn how to play and win with a poor hand. The longer and harder you train will enable you “stack the deck.” Eventually you will be playing with 5 Ace’s and a few jokers up your sleeve. From the outside your stellar performance will look like a damn magic trick but, like all magic, it’s the hard work put in by the magician that makes it look real.

ONE more LAP Cyclocross






Old post... but still a good read. Get ready for CX season... it is here.







ONE MORE LAP… (written in the middle of cyclocross season)

As the CX season unfolds I realize how quickly the cyclocross season comes and goes. Months of hard work and it is almost time to start thinking about racing on the road bike again. With only 4 weeks left in my cyclocross season I must remind myself to race every moment of every race before the season ends. It is so easy to back down… damn every race I want to quit at some point. I always think of what I heard Kent Bostick said to my friend John Hart… "Little buddy...Your pain is not special." I live by these words during the hardest part of the race. Sometimes as I am gasping for air & my legs hurt so bad I want to cut them off… I just remember that “my pain is not special.” As I spit on my top tube unable to see straight…. I remind myself again… “Your pain is not special”I hurt… damn do I hurt. Every day I train… I hurt.
This past year at masters nationals I was standing on the curb yelling at my wife with 1k to go in her time trial. She was 3 seconds back on my time sheet. I noticed she was crying when she rode by…these were not tears of sadness… dude these were tears of insane pain… pain I don’t know if I have ever felt. I go hard… damn sometimes I go so hard I can’t feel my hands or feet…but have I ever gone so hard I cried! Never…not yet… And I guess that is why she as a stars and stripes jersey and I don’t……….. So this year that is my new goal… To race so hard that I either pass out or cry… Pain and failure is 99% of this sport. So why every time I am suffering do I feel pain and usually fail? You would think I could ignore the pain and grab success by the nads….. It is at the moment when it hurts the MOST….I start to think “my pain is special”…. But I know it isn’t.. We all feel it… we all want to quit. Every minute of every interval I think about it for at least a few seconds… It is like beating your head against a concrete wall. Each time you slam your forehead into the wall it hurts, but the wall doesn’t move. The crazy thing is………. I have been repeating this process for 6 years now. So this must not be failure. I didn’t LOSE... I raced my brains out and went as hard as I could... each year I get faster…..the guy in front of me must be stronger … so should I just quit and not chase him? No way!!! There will always be someone faster… The struggle is what I love the most. I think to love any sport, and especially to survive racing you have to enjoy getting (beat down) as much as you enjoy “giving the beat down.” I just want to be out there suffering… it always feels so much better when I am making others suffer…but I learn more and grow more from being on the receiving end of a good ass beating. Motivation comes from failure for me. I think about the NIKE commercial….
”my better is better than your better”
…. If you haven’t seen it go to YouTube… and check it out. But really… is my BETTER …better than your BETTER…. Damn if that was 100% true I would win a ton of races. I don’t win very often so I think there must be some guys out there whose BETTER is BETTER than my better. So if Kent Bostick is correct that my pain isn’t special… and others are better… why do I bother to suffer and race? 99% of the time I know I can’t win. There are always several riders who are a bit stronger. In some cases a TON stronger. So why do I spend thousands of dollars racing and 100’s of hours suffering each year? That's a great question. With probably 100 different answers. I have my identity so wrapped around cycling what would I do if I stopped? I would probably have a terrible drug problem or gamble my life savings away. So suffering for hours on end might just be a bargain. So now that we have an idea of the consequences if I stop suffering daily and quit riding. The new question becomes: how can I suffer in some sort of bliss? This is a trick I am getting better at each year. I love to watch Chris Horner suffer… the guy is always smiling… Try it… for me it works…. For the first time I have started to invite the pain in… I don’t run from it like I used to… I don’t start to question why I hurt or think “I must be having a bad day.” What I have learned is when you go HARD… it hurts. It always will. I always hear riders talking about “bad legs” most of the time it makes me chuckle. Bad legs usually just mean the race was hard. If you ride with a powermeter I want you to try to ride around 600 watts for 40-45 seconds… that is the start of a cross race. DO it every day… If you ever have a day where that feels easy and your legs don’t burn…Go buy some lottery tickets. So when it hurts…. IT IS HARD!If you are in shape…and have trained a decent amount… and your legs hurt and burn…it is a pretty good sign you are going hard…not that you have bad legs, but that you have fit enough legs to suffer. Somewhere along the way we have come out with the idea that going hard…..should feel good. That is crazy talk.
If you feel good = You are not going very hard (at least not hard enough to get benefits from training or to be successful in a race)If you feel bad = you are probably pegged and on the rivet-this is actually a good thingBad legs = people in your race are “Better than your better”Good legs = you need to upgrade99.9% of the time I think the above is correct. We all have bad days every once in a while. But if ½ of your races are bad… then you are not being realistic. Your training either doesn’t match your goals…. Or your goals don’t match your pedigree.Now that we have solved a pretty serious math problem let’s get back to the fact that most of us are not very good. What do I mean? Most of us suck. Yes we suck. Hard to stomach but the sooner we all figure it out the more credit we can give to the riders who don’t suck…….. Now this isn’t very nice, but what I mean is that the guy who beat me last weekend sucks a little less than I suck. The guy who finished behind me isn’t better than my Better. Every week the goal is to suck a bit less and try to bring the best effort I can manage to the race. Each week I have new excuses as to why I am going to suck. I try to hide them under the bed in a shoe box, but I always let a few slip. Usually I talk about how hard I trained or didn’t train. That is my favorite. But the bottom line is when we walk up to the starting line we are very vulnerable. It is how you learn to deal with the insecurity of sucking that makes you a great warrior.
Dude…. win or lose if you bring a great fight you should be able to pat yourself on the back and be amped about how you raced. Most of the time we just beat ourselves into a pulp during the race, and then continue to do so for the following week. The key is to ask yourself several times during the race “can I go harder?” If the answer is yes… then get on the gas. If the answer is “no” then stay the course. So next time you are out racing at Defcon 1...try to smile… you should be amped that you are killing it. If you are crying then you know you are pegged. Pegged is pegged. The guy in 10th is just as pegged as the guy who won. Neither effort has more value. Like Kent said “your pain isn’t special.” So don’t run from it… invite it in…and next time you are racing and the race is finished... I challenge you to race one more lap… why not… it is what we do and who we are. Cross season will be over in a blink of an eye. Enjoy every painful minute of each lap…. Soon there will be no more laps to ride and no more cross races till next year. My guess is that all of us will spend the next 9 months getting ready to do it all over again!