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How well you do in late-season races depends on how well you ride the CTL wave.

This past weekend I ended my road season and that got me to thinking about how riders deal with those late season races.  Generally, the riders I coach as well as myself as a rider peak in early July for the Superweek races in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.  This means that they should hit peak Chronic Training Load (CTL) sometime in mid-June and begin tapering down and sharpening for a few weeks.  It also means that there really isn’t enough time to rebuild and peak again for early September races.  So what are riders to do?  Well, as with so much in cycling, a lot depends on the rider’s individual situation and season goals.  Usually these fall into two or three broad categories: riders who need a substantial break, riders who need intensity to keep sharp, and riders who are focusing on cross.

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I’ll be racing the Virginia State Track Championships for the first time next Saturday.  The event is run as a 3 event omnium -a sprint time trial, an endurance time trial, and a points race (in my case a 1k tt, a 3k pursuit, and the mass start points race), and for the past few weeks, I’ve been training for those specific events.

First, let me say that those short time trials are among the most painful moments I’ve spent on a bike, despite their being over in a few minutes.  What I find interesting, though, is that despite their short length, pacing plays as vital a role in them as any longer tt.  For the 3k perhaps that’s not that surprising, but for the 1k, an effort that lasts, at most, 90″, I thought conventional wisdom said to jump hard and hang on for dear life, but for me at least, that doesn’t work as witnessed by the first graph below.

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