Weekend Reading from the Tour of California Race Experience: How to Survive a Stage Race on the Sun

Posted on May 18, 2013 by CTS

Riding the Amgen Tour of California Race Experience with Team CTS this past week has been a blast, but that heat in first few days felt like riding on the surface of the sun. I’m really proud of all the riders and coaches for toughing it out, and even more so for being smart. Fitness alone will not carry you though 100+ miles a day for multiple days in 100+ degree heat; you have to be diligent, purposeful, and focused on all the details.

We all suffered like dogs for the first three days of the ATOC, and the cool/cold spring weather in most of the country didn’t help. I normally handle hot days just fine, but the cool spring in Colorado meant I had not acclimated to heat before starting this week’s journey. Since heat was such a big storyline for us and for the pros, CTS Coach Jim Rutberg put together this great FAQ on Adapting to Training and Competing in Hot Weather, including details on the physiological adaptations your body goes through, how long acclimation takes, and what acclimatization steps you can take to improve performance in the heat. He also posted a column I wrote a while back on Four Keys to Effective Training in Hot Weather.

One of the other topics of conversation has been nutrition, particularly in light of a blog I wrote earlier this year called “Let’s Get Real About Your Weight”. In that blog I pretty much said that 90% of the cyclists I meet could stand to lose 10 pounds (I still include myself in that statement, BTW). And while I stand by what I wrote, the unfortunate fact is that many of the athletes who are in that other 10% are also the ones who are constantly – and often to their detriment – striving to be even lighter.

From a performance standpoint, the essential metric for caloric intake is that you need to consume enough energy to support your activity level. When you fail to do this, you’re compromising your ability to recover from workouts, you’re increasing your risk for getting sick, increasing your vulnerability to injury, and hindering your ability to adapt to your training workload and get stronger. Nowhere has that been more evident than during Bucket List events like the Amgen Tour of California and US Pro Challenge Race Experiences.

During big, multiday training blocks or camps, you have to eat today for what you’re planning on doing tomorrow. That means pre-loading your energy stores with hearty breakfasts before big rides, so you stand a better chance of mitigating the energy depletion from today. On the ride, you have to stay on top of energy/fluid/electrolyte intake, so you minimize the stress you put on your body today and reduce the amount/extent of recovery you’ll need to be able to perform again tomorrow. Remember, you’ll have less than 24 hours to recover before another big ride. If you dig too deep a hole, you may not be able to refill it in time!

After the ride, it’s not just the nutrition and hydration you have to think about. You have to cool your core temperature and get cleaned up quickly as well. Elevated core temperature places a continued stress on your body, even after you’re off the bike. Standing around in hot, sweaty, nasty cycling clothes after a big ride on a hot day does you no favors for tomorrow’s ride. Cool yourself down by dousing yourself with water, standing in a sprinkler, sitting in a creek, whatever. And get out of your cycling gear, pronto. Take care of your skin, especially your contact points with the bike (hands, bum, feet) by washing, getting dried off, and attending to any irritations/injuries so they heal faster and don’t get infected.

When Team CTS rolls into Santa Rosa tomorrow, everyone here will have accomplished something monumental and life-changing. Every CTS Bucket List event has its unique challenges, and this year’s ATOC Race Experience has been very different than the previous editions. I believe every rider here has pushed beyond their previous limits for mental and physical fortitude, and learned a bit more about themselves in the process. This is an amazing journey and I’m thankful to Kristin Bachochin and everyone at AEG for their continued support of CTS and the Epic Endurance Bucket List. Be sure to check out our Facebook page for photos from the ATOC Race Experience, and then join us for the US Pro Challenge Race Experience or Tour of Utah Race Experience later this summer!

Have a Great Weekend!
Chris Carmichael
CEO/Head Coach
Carmichael Training Systems

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FAQs About Adapting to Training and Competing in Hot Weather

Posted on May 15, 2013 by CTS

By Jim Rutberg, CTS Pro Coach/Co-author “The Time-Crunched Cyclist”

The extreme temperatures have been a major story at the 2013 Amgen Tour of California, especially because many of the pros in the race came to the race from areas that experienced cool to cold weather this Spring. The techniques for staying cool on a hot day are pretty straight-forward: stay hydrated, douse yourself with water, put ice sock/packs in your jersey, etc. But we’ve been getting a lot of questions about how athletes adapt to heat and why some are struggling to cope with the high temperatures. So, here’s a primer on how athletes adapt to heat:

What happens as an athlete acclimates to heat?

The human body has an amazing ability to maintain core temperature within a very tight range (97-100 degrees Fahrenheit) despite wild fluctuations in environmental temperatures. When exposed to a hot environment for a prolonged period of time, and especially when exercising in hot and humid environments, your body needs to become more efficient at dissipating heat. As a result, you:

  • Start sweating sooner: To stay ahead of rising core temperature, your body kicks your primary cooling system (sweat) into action earlier than when not heat acclimated.
  • Sweat more profusely: Your body learns to open the floodgates to get more fluid onto the skin surface for evaporative cooling.
  • Sweat more evenly: You have sweat glands all over, and your body needs to increase evaporative cooling you’ll start sweating from everywhere.
  • Change the composition of your sweat: The electrolyte content of your sweat decreases as your body tries to pump out more fluid but retain minerals needed for the nervous system and other critical body functions.
  • Increase plasma volume: Your blood is what’s transporting heat from your core to your skin for radiant cooling as well as evaporative cooling. Increased plasma volume increases your capacity for heat transfer, and provides fluid for sweat.

Your heart rate response to exercise also changes in hot environments. Athletes experience higher exercise heart rates at a given workload, compared to cooler environments. This increase is much higher for athletes who are not acclimated to the heat, and as you acclimate your exercise heart rates will return to normal. Both acclimated and non-acclimated athletes also experience ‘cardiac drift’ as an acute response to increased core temperature, in order to facilitate heat transfer from your core to your skin/extremities where it can be dissipated through radiation, convection, conduction, or evaporation.

How long does it take an athlete to acclimate to heat?

The process starts in the first few days you’re exposed to increased temperatures, as long as you’re exposed to the heat for at least an hour each day over the course of consecutive days. It takes between 10-14 days to be completely acclimated to the increased temperatures. NOTE: This is why some athletes at the 2013 ATOC are suffering so much. Acclimation takes time, it’s difficult to accelerate the process, and the process is hindered by dehydration and/or exercise at high intensity levels – which are pretty much impossible to avoid while racing a major stage race through the desert.

What’s the difference between acclimation and acclimatization?

Heat acclimation is a passive process that results from exposure to hot environmental conditions. In other words, acclimation occurs as you’re going about your normal daily activities. Acclimatization is an active process of ‘heat training’, where your activities are designed to improve your performance in hot environments.

How does heat acclimatization work?

The training athletes do when they first arrive in hot environments is an example of acclimatization. Exercising in the heat 60-90 minutes a day for 5-10 days will initiate the physiological changes necessary to perform optimally in the heat. A reduction in intensity and volume is necessary during this time. Reduce your intensity by 60-70% during the first 3-4 days (ride easy for 60-90min), and then gradually increase the intensity and duration of your workouts over the next 3-5 days. Not only does this give your body time to modify your sweat response, but it also gives you time to adapt to consuming and processing an increased amount of fluid. Be sure to drink plenty of fluids and allow your body time to adapt, and you’ll soon be able to increase your exercise intensity in the heat.

Athletes can also perform heat acclimatization training prior to traveling to a hot environment. An example of this occurred before the 1994 Track Cycling World Championships, which were held in Palermo, Italy. The US National Team trained on indoor trainers in a hyperbaric chamber at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, which was set to replicate the high heat, high humidity, and low altitude (sea level) of Palermo. The strategy worked, and the team earned two golds, two silvers, and a bronze on the way to finishing third in the medal count. At the time it was one of the US team’s best overall performances at the Track World Championships. Simpler methods of acclimatization training include wearing additional layers of clothing, sitting passively in hot sauna (heat exposure) or training in a hot room.

Is it better to perform acclimatization activities before traveling to a hot environment, or once you get there?

Before. Sitting in saunas and training in warm rooms prior to traveling to hot environments is less disruptive to your overall training progress, because the exposure to heat is temporary. When you travel to a hot environment you have to reduce training volume and intensity until your body can handle the heat stress. You can minimize this loss of effective training time by doing everything you can to prepare for the heat prior to arrival. However, keep in mind that no matter much preparation you do before arriving, full acclimation will still take some time.

Should athletes restrict fluid intake in training to adapt to a lower fluid requirement for races in hot conditions?

NO. This idea circulates every few years, but it’s just plain bad. Neither ‘dehydration training’ nor ‘starvation training’ are a good idea. Not only can they be dangerous to your health, they don’t really work either. The physical work you’re doing generates a ton of internal heat – it’s not just the hot air around you that’s the problem – and both sweat and increased blood flow to the skin are your primary means of dissipating that heat and allowing you to continue working. When you restrict fluid intake and hamper your body’s ability to dissipate heat, core temperature rises out of control and your body finds other – less pleasant – ways to slow you down, like diminished focus and motivation, nausea, and dizziness. In part, these are protective measures to get you to stop generating so much heat.

Jim Rutberg is a Pro Coach with Carmichael Training Systems and co-author, with Chris Carmichael, of seven books on training and sports nutrition. For information on CTS coaching, training camps, and the CTS Team that’s riding every stage of the 2013 Amgen Tour of California, visit www.trainright.com. This month, sign up for coaching and get a FREE Giro Atmos helmet: www.trainright.com/coaching/giro-for-giro-offer

 

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4 Keys to Effective Training in Hot Weather

Posted on May 15, 2013 by CTS

By Chris Carmichael

In 40-plus years of cycling, I’ve never experienced heat like I did climbing through the Pyrenees mountains when I rode with team 7-Eleven in the 1986 Tour de France… or the first three stages of the 2013 Amgen Tour of California. There’s not a spot of shade anywhere, the narrow canyons offer no breeze and the sun bakes the rock walls, the road, and the riders. I felt like my shoes were on fire and I was breathing through a hair dryer. 

Heat is the ultimate enemy for an endurance athlete, because after a point, the hotter you get, the slower you’ll go. Part of the problem is that your body generates heat when you exercise, and there’s absolutely no way to avoid it—it’s the primary by-product of physical activity. Only a small portion of the energy liberated from food is used for mechanical work, such as walking or pedaling. The rest radiates from your body as excess heat, which can be a big problem when it’s hot outside. Fortunately, with some planning and attention to detail, dangerously hot days won’t slow you down, and you’ll be able to continue to maximize your training and racing.

Expose Yourself Consistency is a key to acclimating to hot, humid weather. Active exposure, such moderate-intensity cycling, leads to faster and greater adaptations than passive exposure, such as sitting in a sauna or un-air-conditioned house. Chances are if you’ve been riding all summer, your body has already made the key adaptations of increasing blood plasma volume (to produce more sweat) and beginning to sweat earlier and over more of your body. Acclimating typically takes two weeks of consistent heat riding. While you don’t need to ride every day in high temperatures, when you’re trying to acclimate, don’t go more than two or three days between hot training sessions.

Staying hydrated and well fed is also critical to the process of temperature acclimation, and it’s important to note that it’s totally ineffective to restrict liquid intake purposely in an attempt to teach the body to perform well without it. Not only does it not work, it’s dangerous, and you’re better off supporting your body’s natural adaptations with plenty of fluids.

Pick Your Time Riding in the morning or evening to avoid the heat of the day falls into the “no s—t” category of advice, but there are other cooler times to ride, such as in the rain or soon after a thunderstorm. Training in the rain also offers the bonus of gaining the wet-riding skills and confidence you’ll need when the sky opens up at your next race or century. If the mercury is scaring you away from hard intervals, which generate the most body heat, consider doing your intervals in an air-conditioned room with fans before going outside to complete the rest of your training volume at a steady, moderate intensity. Personally, I’d ride outside at midnight rather than spend more time indoors in the summer, but maybe that’s just me.

Warm Up To Cool Off A thorough warm up is vital in the heat because it lets your evaporative cooling system get up to speed before you do. Jumping right into a hard effort spikes your body temperature before you’ve started sweating enough for your system to begin cooling you. One of the benefits of greater fitness and acclimation is that your body begins sweating earlier–it’s much easier to keep a body cool than to use sweat to cool it once it’s overheated. To stay on the safe side, start workouts off slowly when it’s hot.

Get Wet  When it’s really hot, in my days and even now, Tour de France riders grab bottles from fans, but not to drink. Drinking water comes from the team car, but the water from the fans is perfect for cooling off. Does dumping water on your head and clothing help? Yes. Cyclists have an edge over other athletes in this type of cooling because we move fast enough to have constant airflow over the wet clothing. On heat alert days, carry extra bottles or stop and refill often to ensure you have enough liquid to keep your body wet. If you overheat to the point of heat illness, find a way to immerse yourself in cool or cold water, the best way to reduce core temperature, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Jump in a creek, stand in a sprinkler, use a hose—whatever you have to do to completely soak yourself. The wetter you get, the more quickly you’ll dissipate heat.

(Adapted from Chris Carmichael's column in Bicycling Magazine.)

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Weekend Reading: Four Tips for Acing Your Next Performance Test

Posted on May 11, 2013 by CTS

If progress is important to you, then measuring and monitoring your performance is critical. We know, for instance, that in the first six months an athlete works with a CTS Coach, they can often see a 10% increase in CTS Field Test Power. Increased power isn’t the only way we measure success with an athlete, but it is certainly an indicator that your training is headed in the right direction.

The coaches and I have been using the CTS Field Test for more than a decade, and since it’s been published in books and magazines, tens of thousands of athletes have used it to establish their training ranges and measure their progress. Because it’s so widely used, we get plenty of inquiries about how to “do it right”, I’m going to give you some tips to ace your next field test.

Before I get there, I want to address another question we get from athletes: Why is the CTS Field Test 2x8minute time trials separated by 10minutes of easy spinning recovery, rather than one 20-minute time trial? I covered this question in more detail in “The Time-Crunched Cyclist, 2nd Edition”, but the short answer is that the 2x8min test has been shown to provide accurate and reliable data that correlates with an athlete’s lab-measured lactate threshold power and/or heart rate values (Klika et al., J Strength Cond Res. 2007 Feb;21(1):265-9). Your field test power will be about 10% higher than your lab-tested LT power, and that factor has been incorporated into the calculations for CTS Training Intensity Ranges. I’ve also found that a wider range of athletes can successfully execute the 2x8min test, and repeating the time trial twice offers a glimpse of how an athlete recovers between hard efforts.

Now, on to tips for acing your test.

Start hard. Ramp up over first 15-30sec, but at that point you should be “on it”.
Since the prospect of an all-out 8minute effort can be intimidating, some athletes sandbag the beginning of the time trial to save energy for the second half. In extreme cases of this, we actually see power files that gradually slope upward over the course of 8 minutes. Don’t do that; your average power will most likely end up lower than it would have been otherwise. Why? Because you’re starting out at a less-than-max power, but one that still generates plenty of lactate. By the time you get to the back half of the effort, that lactate will prevent you from reaching power outputs high enough to outweigh or cancel out the weak beginning. The image below is an example of an athlete who tried to ramp up throughout the efforts. Compare the heart rate line (red) from this iamge to the ones later in the article. In this image, heart rate climbs quite significantly throughout the effort, whereas the heartrate increases rapidly and then levels off more in the other images.

Finish Hard

FEATURED LINKS

In the final minute of each effort, it’s better to fade than accelerate.
People want to see a flat line on a graph, but when an athlete aces the field test we typically see their power fade or fade and then level off toward the end of the efforts. That means you’ve really pushed yourself and that you’re over threshold, generating a lot of lactate, and fighting to process it fast enough to maintain a high power output. If you’re able to find a final kick that keeps your power/pace from falling, that’s great. But if you have enough gas left in the tank to actually increase power through the final minute, you weren’t going hard enough in the bulk of the effort.

The image below is an example of a power file where the athlete increased power through the final minute of each effort (yellow line). His coach’s conclusion was that his 277 and 279watt values were actually lower than what he could have done. Within two weeks of training, this conclusion proved to be true and his training ranges were increased. Back-calculating from his corrected ranges, his field test would have been more accurate at about 286-288watts.

Peak at End

Get a good warmup
Some athletes erroneously think that the CTS Field Test utilizes two 8min time trials because the first one is a warmup and the second is the one that counts. That’s not it. You want to conduct a good warmup before the first 8min TT effort. One of the more successful routines is to ride for 15-30 minutes, and then do 1min FastPedal (high-cadence, low-resistance spinning), ride moderately for 1min, then do 2x1min PowerIntervals separated by 1min easy spinning recovery. Ride easy for three minutes and then start the first field test effort.

Two identical time trials does not equal a perfect CTS Field Test
It is rare for an athlete to legitimately execute two identical field test efforts. When we see a graph with two very nice, flat wattage lines, with minimal fluctuations in cadence or dropping off or ramping up at the end, it’s more likely that the athlete used their power meter to pace the field test rather than just record it. The image below is indicative of an athlete who most likely paced the field test, aiming for a predetermined output. That's great in an interval workout, but not in a performance test.

Steady Eddy

Steady and conservative isn’t what we’re after here. We don’t want to see you hold back on the first time trial so you can match the output on the second one. That doesn’t tell us as much as seeing how your performance changes over the course of a raw, unpaced test. The image below isn't perfect (it probably fades off a bit to severely), but you can see that the athlete's heart rate rises quickly and then levels off, and that the power output (while still variable) starts to level off in the back half of each interval. Over time, this athlete's field tests will likely "tighten up", in that the peaks and valleys won't be as dramatic, and he probably won't start out quite as hard.

Peak and Fade

If you have questions about your recent or upcoming field test, send them to chris.carmichael@trainright.com and the coaches and I will help you out. Also, keep in mind, that even though I talked primarily about power today, the CTS Field Test and subsequent training ranges are equally effective using heart rate only. If you want to start training and testing with power, contact Cameron Chambers at Athleteservices@trainright.com and he'll help you get the best powermeter for your needs.

Have a great weekend!
Chris Carmichael
CEO/Head Coach
Carmichael Training Systems

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Weekend Reading: Are you Prepared for the Springtime Tipping Point?

Posted on May 4, 2013 by CTS

For the first few months of the year, it’s not too difficult for athletes to make and see significant progress with their fitness. After losing fitness through the fall and winter, simply increasing weekly training hours is enough to re-establish a moderate level of fitness. But now it’s May, and many athletes are reaching what I call the Springtime Tipping Point.

What’s the STP? It’s the point at which generalized training stops producing measurable results. It’s the point where you go from getting steadily faster, stronger, and leaner to sitting on a frustrating plateau. To tip your season in the direction of continued success, now is the time when you need to get smart about your training.

Tip #1: Increase “Time-at-Intensity”

What happens to a lot of time-crunched athletes is that once you establish your “summer” schedule for training times (mornings, after-work, etc.), your weekly training workload may become stagnant. For many people that stagnation manifests itself as a steady routine of a Tuesday night group ride/training crit, a Thursday interval workout, and then weekend long rides or races. Triathletes, too, tend to settle into a very predictable weekly schedule for the summer. While consistency is good, stagnation is not.

In order to keep pushing forward, you either have to increase training stress so your body has something to adapt to. Most likely you can’t add more hours, and turning every ride into an all-out time trial is just an indiscriminant and wasteful use of energy. Apply more precision and look at increasing your “time-at-intensity” for lactate threshold work and VO2 max intervals. If you accumulated 60minute at LT across a week of your generalized rides and interval workouts, aim to increase that to 70. If you spent 30minutes at VO2 max intensities, aim to get to 35minutes.

FEATURED LINKS

  • Giro for Giro Coaching Offer: To celebrate the Giro d’Italia and our partnership with Giro Sport Design, CTS will buy you a Giro Atmos helmet when you sign up for any CTS Coaching package in May.
  • Earn $300 Coaching Credit: Can’t come to the US Pro Challenge or Tour of Utah Race Experiences? Refer a friend and we’ll give you $300 credit toward CTS Coaching so you can prepare for your next big goal!
  • Colorado Springs Climbing Camp: Join us June 5-8 to learn how to climb faster and descend with confidence!
  • Santa Ynez Climbing Camp: Visit Southern California June 12-15 and learn to be a stronger climber. Includes great ascent of Mount Figueroa!
  • Hors Categorie Climbing Camp: July 9-14, ride iconic Rocky Mountain climbs, including Mount Evans and Pikes Peak at 14,000 above sea level!
  • Epic Mountain Bike Camp in Breckenridge, CO: June 27-29, prepare for your big summer epics with this instructional, high-elevation MTB camp.

Tip #2: Focus on Speed

Whether you’re a racer or not, incorporating some speedwork into your training is a good way to break out of a plateau – or avoid one in the first place. Athletes sometimes get stuck in a rut where they focus so intently on energy system development that they overlook the workouts that help with the application of that fitness! One workout that I like to use to liven up a training program and develop great power for accelerations is SpeedIntervals:

How to do a SpeedInterval Workout: 30-second sprint, 30-seconds recovery, times four. In other words, start by rolling at around 15mph in the big chainring and a moderate gear on the cassette. Sprint for 30 seconds, then ease up and spin lightly as you gradually slow down over 30 seconds. Then sprint again. Spin down. Sprint. Spin down. Sprint one final time. Spin easy for 5 minutes and then repeat the 4x30sec/30sec SpeedInterval set. For a moderately fit rider I like to incorporate 3 sets into a workout. Advanced riders can do 4 or 5 sets in a workout. When will you feel the benefit of this workout? When you have to pop out of a corner, or close a gap in the paceline, or accelerate onto someone’s wheel and then sprint around them.

Tip #3: Make sure you’re not over-doing it

The first two tips deal with increasing your training stimulus, but athletes also have to consider the option that their workload is high but their recovery is not adequate. As the spring/summer season heats up, some athletes have so much weekend workload from races and/or big workouts that there’s really not that much need for a lot of training stimulus during the week. In fact, repeatedly shoe-horning intensity and volume into the weeks between big weekends can start to work against you.

For racers, you should consider whether you’re in or going into a “race-and-recover” period, where your weekend races are also the primary training stimulus for the week. This is something that racers can sometimes maintain for 4-6 weeks at a time by incorporating a mid-week training crit or interval session (or motorpacing if you have the skill and opportunity) and a short Friday ride with “openers”. It’s not that you need to take all the other days as complete rest days; but it may be advantageous to go from two hard interval workouts during the week to just one.

Even if you’re not racing, you’re big weekend adventures could also be providing enough training stress and stimulus that you could benefit from two recovery days (Monday and Tuesday), one good interval day on Wednesday, an endurance ride or group ride on Thursday, and then a recovery day on Friday so you’re rested for another big weekend.

Getting out the door and working out consistently is commendable and puts you leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of the population. But generalized training will only take you so far, and for endurance athletes in the Northern Hemisphere we’ve reached the time of year when your progress is likely to stall out. Don’t let that happen, kick it up a notch and tip the scale toward continued progress!

Have a great weekend!

Chris Carmichael

CEO/Head Coach

Carmichael Training Systems

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