Summer Base

            Currently, many of you are enjoying your long, slow endurance miles and spending quality time in the weight room—all in preparation for the spring races and the high intensity training that precedes them.   The more laid-back training style that blows in with the cool fronts of fall is part of what makes the off-season refreshing, and plays a vital role in making the spring and early summer races so fast.  

            Then, mid and late summer roll in, the air gets hot and the burnout begins to settle in.   I call it the “summer blues”.   In Texas, we start racing earlier than most any other region, and we drag our road season out well into everyone else's ‘cross season or off-season.   On top of this stress is the fact that we get some of the hottest summers in the nation, and we have a recipe for a fizzled fall.   The fatigue of our long season exhibits itself in the notoriously low turnouts for fall races.   We've all heard complaints in September of being “fried,” “needing a break,” or being   “just burned-out”.   Lately, we've seen a decrease in the number of mid- and late-summer races being promoted, and probably for good reason.   Racers are fatigued and the heat seems to put a damper on the racing.   Our bodies just can't function optimally when it's 100+ degrees and the humidity exceeds 70%.   It takes so much blood to cool your engine that there's not enough blood left to fuel the fire.  

            As a result of these factors, I don't know anyone who races consistently from February through October, much less adding a cyclocross season to the remaining three months.   If you've trained your aerobic base November through January, the benefits of that foundation will erode by June.   However productive intensity training is, too much of a good thing is a bad thing.   After a few months of neglecting aerobic base training, your efficiency at low and moderate intensities deteriorates, as will your recovery times, and some cyclists will even lose muscle mass and strength over the course of a race season.    

This condition can be observed easily with a graded exercise test when the graph makes a concave line.   Instead of progressing steadily through zones 2 and 3 before reaching zone 4, your HR will rocket from the top of zone 1 right to zone 4.   Your system no longer knows how to work at a moderate rate.   When you add any intensity, it assumes you're starting a crit with a first-lap prime.   It has lost the ability to conserve its precious energy resources.

I've subjected you to all of this coach-babble to make a case that many of us are trying to drag out too long of a race season on too little base training, and that racing for so many consecutive months that you hit a burnout is detrimental.

  This calls for a return to aerobic base and strength training sometime in the summer.   In our great state, this time just coincides with the 100 degree weather, when it's “too hot to ride hard”, according to many of us.   It includes taking a complete break from racing for at least four to six weeks, maybe even eight weeks.   I know that I'm committing the equivalent of heresy to a few promoters of summer races.   They may find this page useful for stuffing wet riding shoes or for kindling their yule log.   Sorry guys.   Fortunately, though, we do have that natural lull in the race schedule, so you can plan your summer base training around whatever race you still want to attend.

If you race cyclocross, you'll find this summer base cycle instrumental in being fresh for ‘cross season.   If you have any interest in the flurry of road races we have available in the fall, you'll find this break to be revitalizing as you prepare to trade blows again when the weather cools down.