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Time for camp: Lotto heads to Spain

By Dirk Friel - Peaksware.com
Published: Dec. 23, 2007
There's still time to relax at a local café in Benicasim, Spain.
There's still time to relax at a local café in Benicasim, Spain.
Photo: Dirk Friel

It’s that time of year for roadies. This month, many of the world’s top professional teams have made the move to warmer climes to reassess their 2007 campaigns and to get ready for the coming season.

In Spain, the seaside resort community of Benicasim played host to training camps for the Silence-Lotto (formerly Predictor-Lotto) and Liquigas teams for pre-holiday get-togethers, setting the tone for the year ahead. I had the privilege of attending the Lotto camp for the second year in a row, working with staff and riders to implement and manage the team’s training and race data management system.

Silence-Lotto’s camp not only offers a chance for most of the riders to escape the gloomy weather conditions back home in Belgium, but it also provides an opportunity for new riders, including Yaroslav Popovych, to work with teammates, support staff and managers for the first time. Cycling, after all, is a team sport where trust and respect are key elements of success. In modern cycling that includes the interesting navigation around language barriers.

The 2008 team kits are still being produced and contractually can’t be worn until January 1. This also means new members to the team are still training in their current team clothing even though they are training with the team for which they will be racing next season. Training camps at this time of year can look like a mixture of teams depending upon how many riders have transferred in from other teams.

One thing that is consistent throughout the team, however, are the team bikes. All riders have already been sized up and provided team issue bikes prior to the camp. This is a crucial time of year to adapt to new geometries and sometimes new pedal and shoe combinations.

Medical checks
Like most teams these days, Lotto runs each rider through a series of medical exams which include blood profiles, cardiac output, bone density, VO2 max and lactate threshold tests. The lactate threshold and VO2 max tests are used to track fitness throughout the season and to establish training zones. The team utilizes a state of the art mobile physiology lab which was transported from Belgium in order to test individual riders.

Meetings are also regularly scheduled within training camps and often occur after dinner into the late evening hours, since most of the day is spent training and working on bike positioning, testing and equipment selection. The Lotto riders attended an array of meetings including sponsor and equipment reviews, meetings with team directors to introduce race programs for the year, set initial expectations, review anti-doping measures and introduce everyone to the new 24-hour-a-day monitoring system implemented by the UCI and WADA.

Managing fitness and race form
The Silence-Lotto team is entering its second season of reliance on a training and race data management system to efficiently monitor, analyze and plan their training programs. The system allows each rider’s data to be securely shared amongst those who are granted access, such as personal coaches, team doctors and managers. The system is compatible with all downloadable devices which the riders may use. That means that riders’ use of devices including Cateye, SRM, Power-Tap, Garmin, Polar and others can be synchronized to their training accounts on our site at TrainingPeaks.com.

During the camp riders attended a team meeting to review 2007 data and discuss changes to the data management program in 2008. The program is not only valuable for the riders, personal coaches and team physicians, but the UCI is also starting to request that teams implement a training management system in an effort to cross reference training programs with location information for out of competition testing.

Training concepts and methods were presented and special interest was placed on the timing of peak form and how accumulated fatigue can severely affect a rider’s performance. All too often riders are simply focused on training in an effort to make their fitness as high as possible, without planning enough recovery phases to allow that form to peak. The athletes don’t always realize that fitness is slow to develop, while fatigue accumulates quickly. A rider can’t build fitness without also developing fatigue. The question becomes how much fitness can be achieved before fatigue hinders form.

The classic periodization model was reviewed as one such solution to managing fitness and fatigue in an effort to build the highest form possible. The intent is to educate the rider to constantly self-evaluate and calculate both fitness and fatigue levels.

Individual consultations were conducted to review 2007 performances and trends in training. New arrivals to the team are provided the appropriate software and trained on how to record and synchronize daily data to their web-based training accounts. We also paid special attention to those riders who have personal coaches in order to ensure the coach uses the team’s data management system to monitor and plan the rider’s training so their peak fitness is aligned with the team’s goals.

Training
During the training camp the team was divided into two groups based upon riders’ primary objective for the season. Riders needing form earlier in the year for the Classics were in one group, while a more “stage race” oriented group trained together. The entire team would leave the hotel promptly at 9:30 each morning and then break out into the two groups once they exited town.

Most rides were between three-and-a-half and five hours and maintained a consistent pace the entire time. The terrain around Benicasim (an hour north of Valencia) is very hilly and features climbs of up to 15km. Riders rode two-by-two and took five-minute pulls on the front at a high Zone 2 pace (a good 30 beats below lactate threshold heart rate). If you’re interested take a look at the resulting individual
training files on the web.

Every third day was a rest day and it afforded the riders a chance to sleep-in and ride on their own for up to two hours. Often on those rest days, groups of riders would gather in the hotel lobby and then head out with the goal of simply riding to a neighborhood café for a cup of coffee and a biscuit.

Four more years!
Silence-Lotto had the added occasion to celebrate a rare sponsorship continuation as Omega Pharma (parent company of Davitamon, Predictor and Silence) decided to extend its support of the team until the end of 2011. The announcement added a boost of morale to both athletes and staff. Team director, Marc Sergeant, took the opportunity to speak to the team about the sponsor’s commitment and emphasizing that the relationship is a two-way street, meaning that that each rider holds the responsibility of the entire team’s reputation in their own hands. It’s a point made even more obvious with the recent withdrawal of Deutsche Telekom from cycling sponsorship.

The team’s next training camp is in January in Portugal but some, including Aussie stars Cadel Evans and Robbie McEwen, won’t be there because they will already be racing in the Tour Down Under. The hopes of the team are very high after having a very successful 2007 season.


Dirk Friel raced professionally as a cyclist on the roads of Europe, Asia and the Americas. He is an Ultrafit Associate coach specializing in road training with power and is a co-founder of Peaksware, LLC. He may be reached by e-mail at Dirk@Peaksware.com.