Combining quality professional coaching and a cycling power meter is the best way to improve cycling performance. Static training plans and self-coaching can be good introductions to training, but athletes quickly reach the limitations of both. Merely purchasing a cycling power meter is a step in the right direction. However, it’s important to take these …
Here’s a scenario a ton of athletes experience, but few talk about: The night after finishing a big endurance competition or a long and strenuous workout, you lie awake in bed or toss and turn despite being thoroughly exhausted. Your sleeplessness may be compounded by feeling like you are radiating heat or you can feel/hear …
Last weekend 21-year-old CTS Athlete Greg Daniel won the USPRO Road Race National Championship with a perfectly timed acceleration less than two kilometers from the finish line. Since then nearly every news story about the race has called it a surprise victory and noted there were stronger favorites in the final group of 10 riders. …
It’s Saturday morning and it’s going to be 85 degrees by 9:00AM, or maybe you have a workout or race scheduled for the afternoon when it will be really hot. It’s nice to say things like “exercise when it’s cooler”, but sometimes busy athletes have to get out there when they can, even if that …
By Jim Rutberg, CTS Pro Coach and co-author of “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” Anytime you see a group of athletes lined up at a starting line it’s important to realize that large percentage of them have already lost the race. It has nothing to do with their fitness or nutrition, but rather what’s going on in …
By Nick White and Chris Carmichael The complexity of triathlon is one of its most alluring attributes. You can get started simply, but then your engagement with the sport continues to grow and develop along with you. For time-crunched athletes the complexity sometimes needs to be trimmed back; there’s only so much time and focus …
Shifting gears is an under-rated skill in cycling. On the wall in our Colorado Springs Training Center, there’s a Murray-branded steel Serotta hanging on the wall. It’s the bike I rode in the 1985 Giro d’Italia, complete with a 53/42 crankset, 12-23 freewheel, and friction downtube shifters. Back then shifting gears was a major component …
With more athletes entering extremely long endurance events, we spend a lot of time educating athletes on pacing strategies. Last weekend, one of CTS Coach Renee Eastman’s athletes provided a master class on long-distance pacing as he rode his way to a second-place finish in the Solo Men category of the 18 Hours of Fruita …
By Jim Rutberg, CTS Pro Coach and co-author “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” For a long time, petrol heads derided American muscle cars for being great in a straight line and utterly useless when they encountered a corner. European performance cars, they argued, were designed for drivers. They had power for speed but also advanced suspension, steering, …
At CTS, we coach a wide variety of athletes with an even wider range of personalities. Some athletes derive value from the feelings and sensations of being fit. Others can only perceive the value of training by analyzing every bit of data they generate. Endurance sports are a good place for the more obsessive among …