OK, so after much cogitating, pondering, drafting, cutting, pasting, and polishing, you have finally produced a genuine work of art that you can be truly proud of - your own personal Alpine Classic Training Programme ©. A gilded path to personal salvation, leading you in carefully graduated stages over just a few short months from your previous status of couch potato with a pushie somewhere out in the shed, to cycling Master or Mistress of the Universe, bestriding the Alps like a lycra-clad Colossus (and in under 8 hours too!)
As much as it might now feel appropriate to sit back, wipe the sweat off your brow, rest on your laurels and admire this splendid achievement, the sad reality is that you now have an even more difficult and challenging task ahead of you. Likely to test you just as sorely as that final climb up Buffalo in 42 degree heat (oops, sorry Phil - make that 37.9 degree heat.) Requiring the application of a combination of strength, skills, endurance, and character that only a select few possess.
No I don't mean getting out on your bike and actually following that training programme. If it was as simple as that, Phil and his committee of fellow sadists would long ago have had to dream up a more demanding route involving Hotham, Feathertop, the Bogong High Plains Road and the Omeo Pub in addition to all the usual climbs. Anyone can get trained up for a mere 4 mountains, 3800-odd vertical metres and a piffling 200km, given the time to train properly.
And there we come to the nub of the issue, the real challenge of the Audax Alpine Classic. Negotiating the time to train for it.
Now, if you're under about 30 years of age and / or enjoying a carefree full-time student lifestyle or similar, odds are you have no idea what I'm blogging on about here. "Negotiating" probably just means debating with yourself whether you'll get up early and go riding, or stay out late, get up late, and then go riding. Or whether you should really allow yourself that tempting slice of cheesecake at the mid-ride coffee stop.
But if you fit the profile of the more typical Alpine Classicist, then you have one or more Significant Others to consider, not to mention some form of paid employment (undertaken in part to support your continued acquisition of ever more high tech cycling equipment manufactured from new and exotic space age materials, in the vain pursuit of technological compensation for your falling level of performance, arising from insufficient time to train regularly, because you are too busy working hard in order to save money for that next frame, groupset, or biometric performance measurement system.)
In these circumstances finding the time for lazy 150km training runs is a bit of a stretch in itself, but the major hurdle is justifying why spending that time riding could possibly be more important than finally getting started on that long neglected piece of home maintenance, running the family taxi service, or spending quality time with those Significant Others on mutually beneficial cultural, recreational, or educational pursuits.
And I doubt you need me to tell you that this can seem a challenge fit to test the ingenuity and eloquence of a brace of SCs. However after conferring with some experienced AACers it seems there are some long standing techniques, forged in the hearth of many years' trying - with apparently mixed success - to prepare properly for the AAC and related activities, which it might be helpful to sketch out for a wider audience. Of course we won't give away all the details and intricacies - part of the challenge of the AAC is working this stuff out for yourself.
"Next Year I'll Only Do the 100/130/140"
The general idea here is quite obvious: you're not really looking to train more in total, just to borrow training time from next year (which you won't need since the 100/130/140 are mere doddles in comparison to the 200) and spend it this year instead, so as to really have that one solid crack at a good 200 time before you're too old / busy / sane.
I should know this one well, and in theory be capable of carrying it off with perfect sincerity, since I wholeheartedly swear this to myself each and every time I get about 2km up Buffalo in the 200. Unfortunately in my neck of the woods, coming from a serial breaker of such promises, this nowadays gets about as much credence as a politician promising to put long term statesmanship above short term political advantage. But perhaps your electorate is more credulous than mine.
Weekend Breaks Within 150k Of Home
Here's an opportunity to please everyone, even the bank manager. Forget those expensive holidays to Queensland, Fiji, Nepal, or Kazakhstan. (It's such a pain to organise bike transport on planes anyway). No, it's time start doing the right thing for global warming and holiday (much) closer to home. In fact within manageable riding distance of home.
Beyond Blue
OK, we're starting to get a little more desperate with some of these strategies. But Phil tells me that a good proportion of AAC entrants are 40-something males. Who are more than averagely subject to various forms of mid-life crisis and depression. Experts tell us that exercise is an ideal preventive for such problems. And a few hours off training every now and then has to be more acceptable to everyone than purchases of red sports cars, or worse.
Sort Out the Shed
In particular, see if you can make enough room to set up a wind trainer, bring that old TV back to life, and hook it up to that superannuated VCR for late evening / early morning viewing of past Tour De France editions as you pedal away.
Negotiate With Your Employer
When all that "spare" time you thought was "free" for training turns out to have been booked for activities you never suspected you were doing, and protestations of your need to get fit are falling on deaf ears at home, it may be time to turn to a more benevolent listener, such as your boss. It's amazing how much quality L4 / E3 work you can get done in an extended lunch break or with one or two late starts a week.
Gross Underestimation Of Training Ride Distance & Time
This is not really a negotiation technique at all. At heart it is a barefaced lie resorted to only by a cyclist desperate to get in those few extra hills or k's - ie just about anyone a few weeks out from the AAC with numerous blank spaces glaring at them from that training diary's last couple of months. Still, it may work on one or two occasions, providing you are able to credibly blame it on an unbelievably bad run of punctures, or your training buddies' frustrating slowness or insistence on that second or third coffee at the halfway point.
Finally, even if only a few of the above techniques - or any others you are able to dream up - bear but a meagre harvest of training fruit, leaving your actual AAC preparation an emaciated shade of the grand plans you started out with, don't despair. Your ride next January may be a little more painful than you'd hoped, but you'll have a much better stock of excuses for why you could really have done much better.
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