What is success? For 2009 Year-Rounder participants Dave Macmurchie and Dion Dyer it was setting personal bests in 200 km permanents. Dave Buyens, new to the Year-Rounder, earned Who’s Who in 2009 along with 17 other riders and 97 cyclists earned the Larry Schwartz award, completing a century each month. In the UltraCycling Cup and World Cup close battles were fought in many of the divisions. Hugh Gapay won the Western 24-Hour Triple Challenge. Consistency paid off for Fabio Biasiolo, John Fuoco, Patrick Hager, Bernd Kral, John Schlitter, Vickie Tyer and Caroline van den Bulk. Qualifying for solo RAAM is a significant achievement; 182 riders earned this distinction.

Dan Kehlenbach and I are writing a book about endurance cycling, tentatively titled Going the Distance, to be published this fall. In it we talk about five factors, which are essential for athletic success:

• Mental
• Training
• Equipment
• Nutrition
• Technique

We teach the reader about these five factors and how to apply them to ride a first century or a better century. We then expand the lessons to cover riding multiple centuries in a year, weekend credit card tours, 300 km brevets and double centuries, week-long supported and unsupported tours, and longer brevets and randonnées.

Mental
The mental side of the sport starts with self-assessment and goal setting. Why do you ride? What do you want to accomplish this year? The UMCA programs and calendar present a rich array of choices and it may be tempting to over-consume, like a kid in a candy store. The top riders in the UltraCup were successful because of consistent performance—they rationed their efforts over the course of the season. A rider who qualified for RAAM set a clear goal and focused on it. As you think about 2010, you might divide your goals into three groups:

      A: High priority events when you want to excel, e.g., a championship race or RAAM qualifier.
      B: Important events where you’d like to do well while riding at 90% effort to save some capacity for A events.
      C: Events that you are doing for training and/or fun.

If you are participating in the Year-Rounder you can still use this framework to sort your potential rides by priority.

Reaching goals doesn’t just happen; it requires planning. Kehlenbach is analytical and creates spreadsheets with daily workouts. I’m more intuitive and sketch out a general direction. However, we both use the same basic approach, dividing the season into pieces:

• Base training: building endurance
• Intensity training: developing power over short distances
• Peaking: combining endurance and power for long-term cruising speed and developing event-specific skills
• Taper: reducing training and storing energy for event(s)
• Performance: the season itself
• Off-season: recovering and getting ready for the next year.

Whether you train by a spreadsheet or the feel of your legs turning the cranks, this is a useful framework.

Although we often talk about mental performance we probably don’t spend time developing the mental skills that can make a major difference in our successes on the bike. Paul Carpenter, a professor of sports psychology, wrote an excellent article on UltraPsych in the Winter 2009 issue of UltraCycling. Mental Training is covered in a six-part series of articles on the website. Invest some time on cold wet days working on your mental skills and you’ll have a performance advantage this year!

Training
Depending on where you are in your calendar and your goals for 2010, January and February may be part of your off-season or the start of your base training. Every rider needs a break both physically and psychologically. Give yourself at least a couple of weeks off the bike and away from training—relax and have fun!

When asked how to improve as a cyclist Eddy Merckx famously said, “Ride more” and that’s good advice! However the type of riding—and base training—depend on your athletic maturity, i.e., how long you’ve been participating in endurance sports.

Dr. Ed Burke in Serious Cycling describes the benefits of endurance activity:

• Increasing the potential of your muscles and liver to store carbs.
• Improving your respiratory system.
• Increasing the efficiency of your heart to pump blood to the muscles.
• Improving the neuromuscular efficiency of pedaling.
• Enhancing your ability to burn fat during long rides.
• Increasing the endurance of your cycling muscles by increasing the density of mitochondria in your muscles where aerobic energy is produced.

If you have been active in endurance sports for a number of years, then your body has made many of these adaptations. If you are fairly new to endurance activities, then you need a longer base period of relatively low intensity cycling to allow your body to adapt.

If you’ve been cycling for a number of years then your body may have achieved many of the cycling-specific benefits of endurance training. If so, get out and XC ski, hike, snow shoe, run—engage in fun, aerobic weight-bearing activities.

If you’re just starting your cycling career, then follow Merckx’s advice and ride more. If you live in a northern climate, this will involve time on the trainer. The UMCA offers the Indoor Challenge, a low-key way to keep you motivated.

Sports science has advanced considerably since Merckx was dominating the sport and we now understand the importance of core strength. Your core is the set of muscles that girdles your abdomen, stabilizes the spine and provides a stable platform against which the muscles of your legs pull to drive the bike forward. Note that these are not the muscles we exercise when we do crunches and sit-ups.

Overall strength training will also make you a better cyclist. Do you get a nagging pain in your shoulder on long rides. Or do your hands start to hurt a bit from too much pressure? Off-season circuit training will improve your muscle tone and help stave off muscle fatigue during long rides.

Research with runners and cross-country skiers has demonstrated that strength and power training for the legs can improve performance by improving economy, i.e., a runner or skier can go faster for the same amount of metabolic energy! Although there have been no well-designed studies with endurance cyclists, the same physiological benefits come from leg strength training.

Core exercises, circuit training and leg resistance workouts provide a nice break from endurance workouts, especially riding the trainer. They need not consume much time—a few hours a week is sufficient. Resistance Training exercises are illustrated for core fitness, leg strength, muscular balance, connective tissues and upper body fitness.

Equipment
Many ultra riders are equipment geeks looking for the best piece of equipment. As I write this there have been lively discussions on our Google chat list about the best wheels and the preferred saddles for ultra riding.

A key principle of success is to test everything before the events themselves. One of the advantages of riding a trainer is that you can test different pieces of equipment and different positions on the bike in the safety of your own garage, without the distractions of the open road.

I’m fortunate to live in Boulder, CO, with easy access to the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. Dr. Andy Pruitt is the expert on proper bike fit—when Eddy Merckx’s son, Axel, started racing, Eddy sent him to Dr. Pruitt to get his bike set up! I’ve been into Pruitt’s lab dozens of times with clients and watched him evaluate a client’s position on the bike and adjust to fit properly—and that nagging back pain or twinging knee goes away! Pruitt tests a rider’s power before and after fitting the bike and often the power increases by 5% or more just from getting everything aligned properly. If you have any issues with pains on the bike, this is the time to get your bike fit checked by an expert. Here’s how Andy Pruitt does a bike fit.

Ultracycling encompasses many different disciplines: riding centuries, brevets, randonnées, 12- and 24-hour races, and RAAM-style events. The vast majority of these are unsupported—we like taking care of ourselves—and this is particularly true of randonneurs. In 2006 and 2007, leading up to Paris-Brest-Paris, Ken Bonner contributed a series of articles on equipment for long rides. Take some time this winter to read the literature on the website and refine your equipment choices.

This is also the time to get your bike and components ready for the season ahead. Most bike shops get very busy as spring approaches—take your bike in early for a complete inspection and tune-up. This will also allow you to take some test rides after you get it back and before your first event.

Nutrition
A healthy body and effective training are keys to performance on the bike and good day-to-day nutrition provides the foundation for these. Jenny Hegmann wrote a terrific article on Every Day Eating for Cyclists in the summer UltraCycling. She describes how to estimate your daily caloric requirement, how to analyze your diet and how to eat to provide all the nutrients your body needs.

A food journal is a very useful tool: write down for a week everything you eat and then you can analyze it. The US Department of Agriculture has developed a food pyramid as a guide to good eating. MyPyramid is a powerful tool and provides an interactive feature that will present a recommended caloric and nutrient intake for you based on your height, weight, gender, and activity level.

“I never met a calorie I didn’t like, ” Susan Barr once told me. Dr. Barr is a professor of sports nutrition at University of British Columbia, an accomplished randonneur and ultra rider and frequent contributor to UltraCycling and ultracycling.com. She has ridden many of my tours and we’ve enjoyed many a meal and conversation. She has taught me the importance of 24-hour nutrition in ultra events. In shorter events we can deplete our energy stores a bit; however, in longer events if calories and water consumed don’t equal calories and water expended we inevitably slow down!

Winter is a great time to review your event nutrition and consider what improvements you might make. As a start, estimate energy needs while cycling and review your event nutrition using Dr. Barr’s on article on How Many Granola Bars?

Technique
Improving our economy of effort on the bike is one of the best ways to improve performance. As described above, strength training and proper bike fit both can improve economy, i.e., how fast you can ride for a given level of effort. Improving your cycling technique can also improve your economy.

I ride a fixed gear bike in the winter, partly to be different, partly because it offers better control in the snow, and partly to work on my pedal stroke. If I’m going to keep the bike moving forward, especially up a grade, I need to put power into more of the arc of the stroke. I work on driving the pedal forward at the top of the stroke by pushing my knee toward the handlebars. (You can also imagine you are kicking a soccer ball). At the bottom I imagine I’m dragging my toes across the floor, getting just a bit more power. On the back part of the stroke I practice lifting my ascending leg so the leg applying power doesn’t have to push it up!

Riding the trainer is a great time to work on your pedal stroke. Riding one-legged is a particularly effective drill. Prop one foot on a stool and pedal away with the other one.

Spin-ups are another effective drill, the trainer equivalent of riding downhill on a fixie. Start at about 80 rpm and every minute increase by 10 rpm until you are spinning at 120 or 130 rpm. The goal is to keep spinning smoothly without bouncing in the saddle. Then work your way back down to 80 rpm.

More Information    UltraCycling Magazine Authoritative information for endurance cyclists. Each issue contains articles by experts on: training nutrition equipment event preparation rider profiles race results Join the UMCA and receive six issues a year.

If you come from a road-racing background, then you probably have good bike handling skills. However, if you haven’t raced, then you should learn a few techniques to make your riding more efficient and safer.

Many of our rides are drafting events and much of the fun is riding with other people. However, riding with others requires skills so you don’t cross wheels and inadvertently kiss the asphalt! My good friend and cycling coach, Fred Matheny, teaches that the most important skill is always protecting your front wheel. Ride so that you aren’t overlapping your front wheel with another rider and you always have an escape route in case of a problem ahead in the group.

Looking ahead and anticipating is another key skill. In many groups calling out hazards is proper etiquette; however, don’t assume that the rider(s) ahead will call out potential problems. Always look down the road over the shoulder of the rider ahead of you. If you just look at the rider’s back that will be the last thing you see before you crash.

Have you ever tried riding on the fog line, the white line between the roadway and the shoulder? Can you ride a straight line or do you wobble a bit? Every time you wobble you’re losing economy of movement. Can you still ride a straight line while getting your water bottle or reaching for the nipple of your hydration pack? Bike wobble often comes from small movements of the upper body. If you have a set of rollers, riding them is a great way to learn to ride a straight line! Another way is to ride your trainer in front of a mirror and practice riding with a quiet upper body.

Descending and cornering are also very important techniques. Davis Phinney, a Boulder resident and former downhill ski racer, developed an effective technique called counter-steering to get you around a corner faster and safer.

Many cycling clubs, especially racing clubs, offer clinics that teach group riding, how to draft in a pace line, counter-steering, how to corner, etc. These clinics are well worth your time!

The theme of this article is doing your homework. You will get the most benefit out of the next several months if you consider the five success factors:

• Mental
• Training
• Equipment
• Nutrition
• Technique

Review the literature, think about how these apply to you and learn how to be a better cyclist. See you on the road.