Gran Fondo Cycling Racing Guide

Episode One of Cat 4 Questions.

When To Taper For Cycling Race or Gran Fondo, Caffeine Gels, Fuel For Early Workouts.

I was gonna call it Cat 5 questions, but someone told me there's no more cat fives. So we're gonna go with cat four questions.

And now I'm very confused because I got an email from a guy that said, yo, dawg, I'm registering for blank, blank race. Do I register for masters or for cat five? So maybe that's a cat four question. There's no cat 5.

So I realized only about there's about 30,000 of you from the US that go to our blog, and the other 45,000 are from a ton of other countries. What up UK, Canada and Australia.

So depending on what country you're watching from, Cat 4 is your newbie bike racer. So just learning and asking all the questions that we've all asked. But it dawned on me when we did an in person bike chat that a really, really experienced cyclist said, “what's TSS?” and I was like, Oh, snap. Okay, we need to rewind a little bit like don't make assumptions.

Please submit your questions. I won't shout you out if you don't want to be.

When To Taper For A Race

Question one: I started road racing and the calendar is super busy on Sundays. My question, should I complete my workouts as normal? Or how do I just adjust? If so, I'm currently going through a build and I tapered for the first race. But then I have a race the following weekend. What do I do?

So the question that I really want to address here is tapering for races and the idea of what does an “A race” mean, and what does a “B race” mean?

So you can't taper for every race or you’d never be building fitness. Now, if you’re coming off a MASSIVE build to your highest CTL, you might be able to hold this fitness for a while, but many athletes can’t dedicate that consistency and hours.

If you race a lot, like racing every weekend, and you have a bike race on Saturday, let’s see how the week breaks down.

Tuesday: hard workout.

Wednesday: endurance and openers.

Thursday: recovery

Friday: openers

Saturday: Race!

Sunday: Group Ride

Monday: Recovery

If you have another race the next Saturday, and you do that all again, your fitness is gonna be super flat, and you're never going to reach your highest high (unless you’re coming off a massive build). But even then, you’re not really building and working on weaknesses or race specific intervals, right?

So that's why as a bike racer, you want to pick events that are a priority; something big and important to you.

A “B race” would be your local training races. Training through a B race, where you’re still building fitness up until the race, resting maybe the day before (lots of factors here), and then just racing for the fitness boost; you’re using the race as a workout.

So, when do you taper for a race? Only if it’s a really important one, or if you’ve hit your highest fitness possible and you’re maintaining for the next few weeks. This is a topic that we want to discuss further though, because every athlete shouldn’t try to “peak”. The overload process might be too much to handle if you are a new athlete and do it incorrectly.

When To Consume Caffeine Gels

Question Number Two: I really love gels with caffeine. But I feel like I shouldn't be popping those every 30 to 45 minutes on a longer ride. Given the half life of caffeine, maybe one per hour? What do you think?

So caffeine is really powerful. I never used it during races until this year. Yeah, I know. It's probably not smart.

But when I drink coffee, It makes me crazy. And then I started drinking way too much coffee, and I'd get kind of sad. So I was like, I don't need caffeine, I'm good without it, but it definitely helps, but the more you take it, the less it's going to have an effect on you.

I've actually started lowering my coffee content.

I might pop a gel with caffeine before my hard intervals, and but if there's too much you become reliant on it.

So what I've come down to for long rides, I like caffeine for cycling at hour two and a half. Because once you hit two and a half hours, that's when endurance starts getting hard. And just having that caffeine to dull that ache that's in the legs, and you have to stay on the gas.

(Another way to dull the ache in the legs is LACTIGO!!!) Code Brendan20

Consume caffeine before crucial moments of an interval session, like before you're going to go bang on the hardest interval. If I'm working capacity, meaning trying to hit eight intervals, I'm gonna do the first four without it, crush one halfway through for last four; this is when it gets really hard.

Fueling For Early Morning Cycling Workouts

Hey, this is a quick question. Hey, I'm riding at 5am. What's the fueling suggestion?

So if I do a group ride, I don't ride that well, when it's that early. Mainly because you don't get to eat.

60 to 80% of your liver glycogen is used overnight, and while you still supposedly have your skeletal glycogen stores, I’m just not topped off.

So what I try and do is just take a gel or a sports drink. I like to eat gels and you take some carbohydrate in drink mix, So that's part of my meal.

I'm not eating solid food at 4am for a 5am ride.

Tapering For Gran Fondo Cycling Event

Okay, hey, I'm tapering for a big gran fondo event. I realized it's not supposed to be a Recovery Week, because I come back feeling somewhat stale, and my legs have a hard time pushing. Any suggestions for these last two weeks?

That's the one thing that I think people can kind of screw up is this really, really long, overdrawn taper.

If you look at the literature, it shows that people do better for neuromuscular efforts (hard, quick, short efforts) with more rest, which is why when I have athletes come off in a rest week, we test neuromuscular durations to keep their PD curve healthy.

Now if you're going to go do a gran fondo, where you need to be able to ride 100 miles, you want to ride 60 miles the weekend before.

If you if you ride a lot, I'd ride 70 miles easy, but keep the body rolling so it knows that it’s going to be riding five or six hours the next weekend. And during that week, you're just dropping the volume keeping the intensity, do some openers (five by 30 seconds at your vo2max power, or about 120%FTP). Do not go set your PR’s for these intervals.

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Brendan HouslerOctober 15, 2020Comment