Tis the Season

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
For those of you who are looking to next year to be more of a serious endeavor, tis the season to really start making changes in your habits and exploring what you can (and can't) get away with. Two obvious things that come to mind are food and training.

As it pertains to food, there's "real life", pre-ride food, on bike food, and recovery food. All of these are equally important. I'm not about to offer suggestions here but I will say that you would do yourself justice by buying this book, reading it, reading it again, and taking notes on it. Then follow the advice in it.

As it pertains to training there are 50,000 ways to skin a cat, and they're all subject to debate. I personally think that some training plan, and I mean any plan at all so long as it's some kind of plan, is better than just winging it. But no matter what plan you choose, they're all going to say that riding 5 days a week is what you should be doing. Waiting until April to bang out 5 days a week isn't a great idea, IMO, because you'll lend yourself to burnout. Now is a good time to slowly work yourself up to what your limits are, to see if you can ride 5 times a week and get away with it, to experiment with blocks, intervals, and so on. I also think it's a good time to work in some sort of baseline. You don't want to have this brilliant plan all laid out only to realize that it's completely untenable 2 weeks into it. Now is the time to stretch things a little if you haven't done so before. Obviously, this post isn't directed at a guy like RyderX who finished Leadville a mere 40 minutes behind Chris Carmichael last year.

Anyway, just some food for thought since 2007 is right around the corner.
 
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