A little footnote to the discussion of pro training and fat / adaptation… I thought it would be interesting to take Team Sky’s plan (PDF) for Chris Froome’s winning stage 19 attack in the 2018 Giro.
It’s interesting because it gives the estimated watts + time for each section of the stage, and therefore the expected calories burned. But it also gives the predicted carbohydrate requirement which lets us know what proportion of those calories they were expecting to be burned through carbs.
Back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that:
The start and first climb at 250 and 350 watts would incur 66% carb utilisation
The hour at 200 watts would incur 50% carb utilisation
The 26 minute climb at 375 watts would incur 80% carb utilisation
The final climb at 450 watts would incur 94% carb utilisation
So it shows a certain level of fat adaptation - but note that even at an easy-for-Froome 200 watts, he’s still using 90g of carbs every hour…
Reminds me of a recent podcast with J Morton: They [Froome & co] are natural high fat burners. Even without training they could go out for 4 hours w/o any carbs (or similar, may get the qoute not 100%)
nice tweet on all the LIT and pro and how easy easy is. And that it is not so easy to say how easy easy should be.
I’ve changed my race schedule a bit, first A-race will be Nationals on a very lumpy course. Having drawn a lot of inspiration from my extracts (I’d say most of my training follows the pro-principle) it’s time for some focus on classics specialists.
however, with Februar eveything changes. Now they race until October and this determines everthing. Racing, racing, racing.
I also found it interesting to see CX riders like MvdP’s brother. He shows everything on Strava. And how little volume he does in winter with all this CX racing.
Dec was just zone 2 riding with some tempo efforts. Not much more, sometimes a little bit more.
Jan: went to Sierra Nevada, altitude. Seems to follow “sleep high, train low”. It is interesting to put the efforts in training in context to the effort today.
I was thinking about this today at work…did olde timey riders of yore do “polarized” training simply because they had way more off-season time compared with modern riders? Have modern riders adopted training at higher intensities year-round because they are racing sooner and longer throughout the calendar? The other studied sports which seem to support a polarized approach, like CX skiing, don’t really happen 12 months out of the year like cycling does, so maybe that’s why polarized works for them but isn’t really seen within the pro ranks.
It was just an observation at the lingering and seemingly baked-in notion that old school cyclist did a ton of LSD riding during the winter before ramping it up to big ring power. I guess when cycling was a seasonal sport, like other endurance sports, that would seem reasonable, but now that pro cyclists are somewhat required to be race-ready almost year-round…the old school method of ‘just riding a lot’ before hitting big ring power seems not applicable.
In the old days they wouldn’t ride at all until January. Perhaps with the exception of those few engaging in CX. I have Greg LeMond’s Trainingbook from 1987 or so in my book shelf. There he writes in detail of what a big negative change it was for him when he moved to Europe as neo pro with this practised winter hibernation. And he equally detested this small ring riding dogma advocated by USA Cycling in these days. And LeMond is my childhood hero, so he must be right …
Perhaps they just rode LSD because they were all fat and detrained from smoking and drinking throughout the entire winter.
