Dr. Hutch: How to Prepare for Disastrous Performance in a Cycling Race

I recently took a wrong turn in my life and went to a bike race. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s only a few weeks away. I’m recovering from a spring of cold after cold, followed by Covid. I have no business going anywhere near a bike race. And now I have the problem of how to prepare for it.Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a cyclist he won multiple national titles in both Great Britain and Ireland, and competed in the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time world champion on the Brompton folding bike and once reached a speed of 73mph when descending a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appear in each issue of Cycling Weekly magazine.To illustrate the problem, here's a conversation I had with my friend Bernard, who has extensive experience preparing for disastrous underperformances in cycling races. “I still have four weeks to go, and I'm less fit than I've ever been in June, and that includes the month of June when I had a broken hip.”“I really wouldn't worry about it,” he said.“Do you think I can be ready in time?”"Absolutely not. But you are so late and so unfit that there is no point in trying. You only make it worse by transforming yourself from an unfit lump to an exhausted unfit lump.Just try to enjoy the next four weeks. They might be the only weeks you have left.”The latest racing content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides delivered straight to your inbox!I will, as you might expect, ignore this. I will do what any sane horseman would do and train panic.I know what I need to do. I need to make a careful training plan, plan the most important sessions between now and the event, allow for sufficient recovery, etc. I refuse to do this because it would mean looking at a calendar and that would only emphasise how close the event is.I also know that I need to keep the volume modest and increase the load gradually. The ideal way to prepare would be to start with the bits of fitness that you can build very quickly, like increasing my aerobic enzyme levels and my blood plasma volume levels. That would mean a few short rides with a few hard efforts, good recovery and good nutrition.Don’t worry, I’m ignoring this too. If you want to know why, just look at the solid reasoning and obvious common sense. Good panic training doesn’t acknowledge the blunt reality of physiology. Panic training isn’t about training, it’s about panic.Instead, I'm going to do everything in random order. There will be volume. I'm not going to ramp this up by some sort of weekly percentage, because those things are for people who have planned well. I'm just going to do 450km a week.There will be quality. Lots of intervals, selected for the amount of discomfort they cause and how quickly they cause it. If the quality begins to decline through what I imagine will be quite a lot of fatigue, I will not disapprove of any of these sessions. I will do them as if ordered by a judge.I’m going to use all the tricks I know. I’m going to use things like heat training, for the extra metabolic load that it creates, and I’m not going to worry about whether the event is going to be hot or not. I’m going to do some hypoxic altitude simulation. Not enough to really produce an altitude training effect, just enough to make me a little more tired and a little more confused.I will avoid strength training and conditioning, and double down on any mobility or stretching. These are not things that will take away the panic itch. And at the end of four weeks I won’t be any fitter than I was, I’ll just be tired, as Bernard said. But what he missed was the other possibility – the very high probability that I’ll get injured. And then I can retire with grace on the basis that I’ve done my very best and because of circumstances beyond my control, etc. window.reliableConsentGiven.then(function(){ !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function() {n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)} ;if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '756449714459937'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); })

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