AAC Training Part 1 - The Ideal AAC Training Programme

Remember the good old days when a "blog" was some unspeakable mess you carefully avoided on the footpath, not a new-fangled term for jill or joe public's unedited electronic ruminations? When a school report was a smallish single sided card with As Bs and Cs, not 15 pages of computer-generated jargon-laden totally meaningless gobbledegook? When "10-speed" meant your bike's entire number of gears, not just the number of cogs on your freewheel?

Well thank goodness we're past all that because back in those days most riders didn't have "training programmes", they just went riding. But these days everyone and their dog has a training programme for just about any physical activity short of lying on the couch.

And seeing as our esteemed Ride Director Phil has rashly invited me to contribute a "blog" about training programmes and suchlike leading up to the Audax Alpine Classic, I've actually got something to "blog" on about.

Yep, I'm fully in support of the idea of a training programme.

In fact I'm even in support of the fact of a training programme.

I'm just not quite so sure about the actual training bit itself.

But fortunately I'm writing this at a time of the year when all that actual training bit (for this blogger at least) lies somewhere comfortably distant in a hazy future of sun-dappled late spring and early summer mornings, with the rude reality of burning legs, dripping sweat, tortured breaths, racing pulses, dead roads, block headwinds, and cliched phrases yet to impinge on loosely imagined visions of powering effortlessly up hills, swooping down descents, knocking off 150 k's and knocking back 3 or 4 lattes while still getting home in time for breakfast.

No, we can leave all that uncomfortable training aside for the moment and concentrate our efforts on crafting the perfect training programme for the AAC.

Even this is an enterprise not to be embarked on lightly. A good training programme can't just be dreamed up and written down in a few minutes over a post-social ride coffee or two. Like a fine oil painting, it needs to be blocked out, gradually detailed, refined, retouched and then left a while in the artist's studio to mature. Yes, a solid month or two's work can go into pondering the pros and cons of routes, distances, intensities, vertical metres climbed, number of coffee stops, number of secret K's not to be included in the programme (more on those in a later edition) etc etc etc. Anything to defer the start of the actual training bit just a little longer.

You can even get some advice and inspiration from a well qualified outside source (and you can stop reading right here if that's your bent). Of course this adds further dimensions of complexity and nuance. There are a lot of training programmes out there. Do you go off-the-shelf, made-to-measure, bargain basement or something else?

Like Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Codes, borrowing someone else's tried and proven formula has its appeal, but you've got to be careful here. (And I don't just mean doing a better job than Dan at making the end product worth the non-refundable hours of your life spent reading it.) I'm a sometime member of the Hawthorn Cycling Club and under the "Who's Who at Hawthorn" web page, various characters have submitted training programmes as part of their personal profile. I've been pretty impressed - not to say intimidated - by some of these efforts. To give just a couple of examples:

Monday: Local Area (Wallan) - Strength/Recovery
Wednesday: Ford Circuit - Endurance/Sprints
Thursday: Local Area (Wallan) - Strength/Recovery
Saturday: Race Northern Combine
Sunday: Local Area - Recovery/Endurance/Strength

or

Mon, Fri: recovery
Tue: hills
Wed: long recovery
Thu: intervals
Sat: race
Sun: hills
(nb "recovery" here = any ride shorter than 100 km at less than 30 kph average speed with no more than one Category 1 climb)

Exhausting business just reading those. Poke about a few other cycling club websites and you'll come across similarly scary stuff, like "300-500 km per week" and so on.

Now in their defence, most of these guys are serious club racers looking to put some silverware in the trophy cabinet alongside the Under 13 Athletics medals and what have you. Whereas we all know that the Alpine Classic is not a race, it's a personal challenge (which is what I'd label any sort of event, race or not, where I have no chance of finishing near the pointy end - ie any sort of event whatsoever). Undertaking personal challenges is about higher things than trophy cabinets and bunch bragging rights; it's about discovering yourself as a person, defining your relationship to the Universe, growing as a well rounded human being - at least that's what I tell my long suffering spouse and kids as I haul them up to Bright for the annual AAC pilgrimage.

An Alpine Classic Training Programme therefore needs to take in the bigger picture, it needs to ebb and flow with the rhythm of the seasons, and it needs to reflect your character and individuality.

So in submitting my own humble profile to the Hawthorn site I like to think I took all that new-agey stuff on board and reflected a more "holistic" view of what a training programme is all about:

Jan: Ride Alpine Classic 200 km. Resolve never to do it again.
Feb: Recovery
Mar: Recovery
Apr: Recovery
May: Recovery
Jun: Recovery
Jul: Watch Tour de France. Recover. Think about training.
Aug: Post entry form for Alpine Classic 200 km. Resolve to start training when the weather warms up.
Sep: Really get serious about thinking about training.
Oct: (Not) Round the Bay (perhaps)
Nov: Recovery
Dec: *&#! Alpine Classic in 7 weeks!! Start training.
(nb "recovery" here = basically doing nothing)

And I am happy to report that at the moment my training programme is solidly on track.

Catch you next time