I recently heard a good quote: “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” That’s true I suppose, but to really feel and perform like an athlete, training like an athlete is required. Sometimes I hear joking about ‘training for RAGBRAI,’ mainly from the experienced crowd of cyclists or young folks who can get away with riding across Iowa without much training or preparation. More power to them. But for the vast majority of the RAGBRAI riders, training is either very beneficial or required.
So to train like an athlete, I mean that you must be intentional about your riding, not just going out and riding. Sure, the more you ride, the better prepared you will be for RAGBRAI, but by being more intentional, you make greater and more rapid progress at awakening the athlete that lies within. This means having a plan and following it. A great place to start, especially if you are new to cycling training, is to use the RAGBRAI Annual Training Plan. Give thought your week’s schedule and what riding you are going to do on which day. People often say they will exercise when they find the time. This doesn’t work very well because you are unlikely to ‘find time’ and puts your training at a lower priority to those other activities that need to get done. Instead, make time to train – make it a priority just like work, eating and sleeping. You will have a much better likelihood of doing it if you prioritize it and build it into your weekly schedule. Another way athletes train is consistently. Consistency of training is by far the most important thing you can do to improve and become more athletic. A simple concept but sometimes hard to do, so another reason to plan your rides.
You have a body, but how athletic is it? Depending on your athletic background and recent riding history, it could be dismal, excellent or most likely somewhere in between. Assessing your current status as an athlete is a good starting point. If you haven’t ridden much (or at all) in recent months or years, you need to get started by building some basic fitness. You will want to start at the beginning of the RAGRAI Training Plan riding just 5-10 miles at a time. You will find that you can advance your mileage quite quickly but do so gradually. Aim for about a 10% increase in mileage per week. Not only will you have to get your legs and heart in shape, but your riding will also train your non-leg muscles to deal with the rigors of long rides, such as your back, neck, shoulders, arms, etc.
If you have done quite a bit of riding in the past year, and may have ridden RAGBRAIs in past years, you likely have quite a bit of fitness and you can start out from a higher level and advance quite quickly. Your body ‘remembers’ your training from last year, especially when it comes to endurance. Endurance takes time to build – you can build it over several years – but it also goes away relatively slowly. So if you’ve ridden a century (100 mile) ride last year, you can probably start out doing 30 or 40 miles this spring without too much difficulty and move up to another century fairly rapidly. Again, do it gradually even though you can start from a higher level.
Once you have your endurance taken into account, another way to train like an athlete is to do more serious, intense workouts. This isn’t required for RAGBRAI but if you are able to do this, you will be in much better shape and stronger to tackle those long multiple days of riding. One option is to do some sort of intervals. A popular term for this these days is HIT (high intensity training) or HIIT (high intensity interval training). I have always just called these ‘intervals’ and it’s nothing new. Intervals can be exceedingly complex but they don’t need to be. They can be as simple as riding faster for a period of time and then slowing down for a period of time. Cyclists often like to define how long the interval and recovery period is, for example, ride harder for one minute and easier for 3 minutes. The options are endless, as is the intensity at which you do these. But that doesn’t really matter as much as the simple fact that you are forcing you to ride faster and harder than you normally would. To ride faster, you must train faster.
Another more serious way to train is to intentionally do hill riding. I like to say that a casual cyclist avoids hills while a serious one seeks them out. With the hills coming on this year’s ride, you will want to be a serious cyclist when it comes to hill training. Riding hills is hard, so that’s why you need to train on them (if you don’t have hills where you live, check out my previous blog on this topic). Make a conscious effort once a week to ride hills rather than avoid them. In July, you will be glad you did.
So to train like an athlete, 1) train, don’t just ride, 2) train consistently, 3) throw in some intensity to your training, and 4) go looking for hills. Do these things and you will be training like an athlete and you will uncover the athlete hiding within yourself.
Coach David Ertl
David Ertl is a USA Cycling Level 1 Coach. He coaches the Des Moines Cycle Club Race Team and individual cyclists through the Peaks Coaching Group. He also provides cycling training plans and ebooks at his website: http://www.CyclesportCoaching.com. He can be contacted [email protected].
