Jason Sumner finishes his summer with an epic.
What would the coach say?
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I’d like to tell you that this week’s headline refers to a late-summer triumph here on the ultra-competitive Boulder road racing circuit, but I can’t. No mountain bike wins either. Not even a lotto scratch ticket.
What I can say is that through twist of fate, circumstance and my innate inability to say no, I managed to log 350 miles (and about 30 hours) during the third week of August. And, as one friend pointed out to me, if you subscribe to the one-mountain-bike-mile-equals-two-road-bike-miles theory, that number jumps to 500. So yes, my summer riding/racing season ended with a bang, which has turned the beginning of the cyclocross campaign into a whimper.
The culprit for this excess was a two headed beast known collectively as the Zinn Gran Fondo meets the American Mountain Classic. For the uninitiated, Zinn Fondo refers to esteemed VeloNews technical writer Lennard Zinn, who for many years now has been celebrating his birth by riding his bike. Each year on or near his birthday, Lennard concocts some semi-ridiculous death march, then cons a handful of his friends into joining him for the long day in the saddle. [nid:82808]
Past excursions have included the 140-plus-mile jaunt from Boulder to the top of 14,240-foot Mount Evans and back, and the 130 or so miles from Boulder to Rocky Mountain National Park’s Trail Ridge Road high point at 12,000 feet and back. Round trip is typically dawn to dusk with a nice lunch stop in between.
But this year was different. This year, LZ turned 50 and that meant a return to the Super Loop. He’d done the ride on his 30th and figured 20 years later was a good time for a repeat. Now, you really need to look at Google Earth to appreciate this route, but the nuts and bolts are a 200-mile trek with more than 14,000 feet of climbing that goes from Boulder to Lyons to Estes Park to Trail Ridge Road to Granby to Winter Park to Berthoud Pass to Idaho Springs to Floyd Hill to Interstate 70 to Lookout Mountain to Golden and finally back to Boulder. It’s a solid Tour de France mountain stage and then some.
Needless to say, LZ talked a few other ambitious friends and myself into coming along for the ride. And while I won’t drone on about every last detail, I will say we started at 4:30 in the morning, recorded more than 13 hours of pedaling time (17 if you include refueling stops), crossed the Continental Divide, covered 205 miles, finished in pitch blackness, and, according to my PowerTap, cranked out 6748 kilojoules.
The hitch was that because of myriad scheduling conflicts, instead of happening back in June on or near LZ’s actual birthday, the Super Loop ride got pushed all the way to August 19, three days before the start of the first annual American Mountain Classic, a three-day, mountain bike stage race in Brian Head, Utah — that I’d also committed to.
Like the Super Loop, the AMC was a first-class ball breaker, its pain spread out over three days. Stages started at 8 a.m., included lots of climbing, lots of singletrack (some of it fairly technical), and lasted about 50 miles per day. The fast guys — Bishop, Horgan-Kobelski, Juarez — were done in four hours or less each day. Mid-packers like yours truly were closer to five or six.
The up side was that, after years of seeing all the MTB stage-racing fun happen in places like British Columbia, Costa Rica, Europe and South Africa, the U.S. finally has a multi-day fat-tire fun fest to call its own. The trails were plentiful, narrow and grin-inducing, the vistas were epic, and the organization was solid. If you’re looking to test the mountain bike stage racing waters, the AMC is a great place to start.
The bad news for me, is that after feeling decent — and having fun — the first two days, my legs, lungs and especially mind all decided they’d had enough during stage 3. I sampled soil twice, cursed under my halted breath a thousand times, and slogged home in just under six hours (stage winner JHK did it in four). It was officially time for a bicycle break.
“When the mind goes nothing else is going to work,” explained my coach, Neal Henderson, who’d been out of the country during my week-long masochistic episode. “The good news is that rest blocks are good. I usually advocate five to seven-day blocks. You can even throw them in during season. The one caveat is that they don’t come only because you have other things going on. You need to actually take that time off as much as possible. You have to make time to take time.”
So here I am, a week or so removed from the Big Bang, and I’m resting. Rides have been few and far between; pace has been slow and slower. And not surprisingly, there’s been a tangible sense of relief. Training had become draining. But now, with a handful of lazy days behind me and a few more to come, the new cyclocross bike in the corner of my garage is starting to look really appealing. Let the games of fall begin.
Cross Time
With that in mind, I sat down with the coach this week to talk transition to cyclocross, a topic that fellow cycling mentor Matt Shriver capably addressed at length on VeloNews.com last week. Just for the sake of variety, here are some of Neal Henderson’s insights on getting ready for jump-run-and-ride time:
“For most people who have been racing all summer, the first thing you should do is take at least a mini break, at least a week. You’ll lose a little top end but the long-term benefits will outweigh that. After that, I really think it’s important to get on the 'cross bike and do some work on the technical skills; work on the finesse aspects.
“With ’cross there is a fitness component and a finesse component. Most people want to bang their heads on the fitness component and tangentially work on the finesse aspect. But when you do skills drills in the middle of an intense effort, you won't create the best habits. Do skill work during lower intensity efforts.
“After that, start doing some high intensity intervals, which are critical to ’cross. You need to be ready to be full gas at the start and stay at that high level for 45 minutes to an hour. So the anaerobic-capacity type intervals of high, high intensity with short rest need to come into the training schedule. That means VO2 max and even sprint type intervals — 20 seconds on 20 off, or even 30 seconds on 30 off. Try a set of 8-12 intervals, and try to do 2-4 sets with 10 minutes rest between sets.
“Also throw in running workouts, but remember to start extremely short. I’ll start off with 10-15 minutes on trails, and I never have cyclocross racers go past 30 minutes. We’ll also do hill running workouts. One of best ways to do running intervals is to carry your bike up the hill and then coast downhill so you don’t get the downhill eccentric tearing that you get from walking or running downhill. That also allows you to work on the carrying and remounting skills.”
Okay, that’s it for now. The coach is still settling back in after a long summer on the road, so no Q&A. But if you’d like to ask Neal Henderson a question, please send e-mail to CoachNealQandA@gmail.com, and I promise he’ll tackle them next go round. Just remember to please include your name and hometown. Questions may be edited for content and clarity.
Editor’s Note: Jason Sumner is a 37-year-old, 170-pound freelance writer and Cat. 4 bike racer who is working with a cycling coach — and training with power — for the first time in his life. Sumner underwent a full battery of lab tests at the beginning of the season, producing a 250-watt lactate threshold, a 3.2 watts per kilogram score and a VO2 max of 51.5. His 2008 goals include improving on his usual mid-pack finishes, not getting dropped on the weekend group rides, and learning something along the way. He is documenting his experiences for VeloNews.com is this twice-monthly column.
His coach, Neal Henderson, is sports science manager at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and a well-regarded elite-level coach. Henderson’s clients include Garmin-Chipotle’s Taylor Phinney, Jelly Belly’s Scott Tietzel and Trish Downing, a nationally ranked paraplegic athlete. Henderson is also the winter triathlon coach for the U.S. national triathlon team, and this year was named USA Cycling National Development Coach of the Year. Henderson is working with Jason Sumner on a pro bono basis.
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