Welcome to my secret world of hurt:
There might be an AFL venue somewhere (Subiaco?) with the moniker "The House of Pain", but I personally struggle to believe that the upstart claims of some manicured footy ground match those of my crumbling local velodrome, which just happens to be the venue for a lot of my recent - and painful - AAC training. As preparation for a 200km event with four massive mountain climbs, you may well wonder about the sanity of training on a flat 300m concrete track. I know I certainly do. But I'll do my best to explain, beginning with some basic scientific principles (pay attention now, there's an exam on the way out).
The pointyheads in sport science research have discovered something called "specificity" (just don't point your mouth in anyone else's general direction as you practise uttering that word). The drift is that to enhance your performance in a given activity, you need to tailor your training to that activity. (Why it took three generations of PhDs in Exercise Physiology to come up with an unpronounceable replacement for the term "common sense" might be fruitful ground for research in its own right) Training in some alternative discipline doesn't generally "cross over" well. Sadly, going to the gym for sessions of leg presses, squats, and other unnatural contortions is likely to improve your endurance cycling about as much as Britney Spears doing yoga will help realise her long-held ambition of becoming a brain surgeon.
So in general, if you want to get properly prepared for an event like the Alpine Classic, there'd better at least be a bicycle involved.
More specifically, the ideal training for our pet event probably involves living in Bright and riding the 200 km route weekly for a year.
But apart from robbing the big day of that epic quality that we all enjoy so much, there are a few practical issues with a training programme quite that specific. Aside from seasonal firefighting duties as a CFA volunteer - regular work but not too well paid - there are a limited number of jobs in the area for starters. So those of us forced by economic necessity to live and work in flatter parts of the world have to make do with less specificity (or is that "more generality"?)
And if we're stuck in flatter parts and busy with all that working and living, there are issues in finding time to visit any sort of mountain to work specifically on climbing specifics. So, irrationally determined as I have been to better my AAC PB, I began my own personal sport science research programme with the help of those 21st century oracles, Google and Wikipedia, to discover what form of training close to home, and manageable within a rather limited time budget, might possibly improve my pathetic climbing ability but avoid falling foul of the specifics of specificity.
To cut a long story short, the rough consensus seemed to be that something called "threshold intervals" might be the answer. This basically means finding a long flattish course with no traffic lights (which is where the velodrome comes in, and you smarties in the front row can put your hands down now please), getting on your bike, warming up, then riding at just about the highest pace you can hold for a duration of 20 - 30 minutes or so. Then resting a couple of minutes (cardiac defibrillation optional) and doing it again. If you're really insane you can even throw in a third repeat. Or throw up, depending on how hard you did interval #2.
The theory behind this apparent lunacy is that climbing well is all about "sustainable power" - which I had previously thought was a solution to global warming - and that these threshold intervals somehow increase your maximum sustainable power output, which further means that when you climb at a lower speeds than maximum (which you do in the Alpine unless you're Lance Armstrong or certifiably insane or both) you can do it more easily and for longer, ie sustainably. More to the point, with higher sustainable power you'll arrive at the business end of the 200km route having a slightly lower chance than usual of being reduced to grovelling up Buffalo at the speed of an arthritic snail. In my case anything that reduces that chance from its normal level of 99.9% has got to be worth trying at least once.
Or so I thought until I actually started trying it.
What I discovered is these exercises are called "threshold intervals" because they drive you to the threshold of madness - or probably beyond, since I'm still doing them. Basically, they hurt. A lot. I haven't personally experienced childbirth, and I know it goes on a bit longer than 20 - 40 minutes, but at least in the delivery suite there's a team ready on hand to provide nitrous oxide, epidurals, and other analgaesia of your choosing. On a velodrome you're on your own and the best you can do to drown out the shrieking from your legs and pained rasp of your breathing is to turn up the MP3 player's volume another notch or two. And hope its selected playlist doesn't finish early, exposing you to the dire aural risk of your tweenage daughter's Delta Goodrem tracks on top of the physical torture you are enduring.
Things were definitely easier back in my pre-AAC days when I could cruise along Beach Road in a bunch, maybe go to the front for a couple of k's, finish off with a coffee break, and claim afterwards to have been on a "training ride".
But as I steel myself for yet another of these sessions I console myself with a couple of thoughts:
- regardless of any improvements in my sustainable power I'm definitely well-prepared for sustainable pain, something the AAC never seems to lack
- if the fires don't go out and Phil ends up having to shift the event to the Wangaratta Velodrome I'll be the best (and most specifically) trained of the lot of you
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