Have I Done Enough Training?
On November 3, 2021, professional cyclist Alex Dowsett set forth to attempt a new hour record on the track at Aquascalientes, Mexico. The hour record is a painfully awful event. You simply ride as hard and as fast as possible for an hour. Sadly, Alex fell just a bit short riding only 54.555 kilometers, which was 534 meters short of Victor Campenaerts’ 55.089 kilometer record mark.
A few days before his attempt Alex posted a video to YouTube describing his preparation for the record attempt in a post titled Have I Done Enough Training? This begs a simple question: did Alex allow enough time to adapt to his heavy workloads? When you shift your perspective from one of training and recovery to one of priming and adapting, the critical question becomes have you provided sufficient workout stimulus to promote beneficial improvements in your fitness, and then balanced that stimulus with ample time to allow your body to adapt to the work load. Training doesn’t make you strong - it simply prepares, or primes, the body for adaptation. Recovery, or adaptation is when you not only recover to your previous level of strength and fitness, but also to adapt to a higher fitness level than prior to the workout session.
One thing is abundantly clear from Alex’s data - he put in some very big, hard weeks of riding in preparation for his record attempt.
His preparation for the hour record began in earnest at a team camp in late June and early July of 2021. The camp consisted of four blocks of long, hard riding over 12 days. Consecutive hard rides averaging over five hours in length were separated by one to two hour easy rides for an average of nearly 30 hours of weekly workouts.
Late June team camp
Team camp was followed by a day of travel, four days of easier riding with lighter volume, and then another full day of rest. The rides averaged around three hours during this period of recovery and adaptation.
Team camp recovery and adaptation block
This block of lighter riding led into another period of harder workouts with six blocks of two or three days of hard riding separated by a full day of recovery and adaptation. The weekly workout load ranged from 15 to just over 20 hours of riding per week, with multiple days of specific hard workouts including sprints and threshold efforts on his time trial bike.
Late July riding blocks
Following this large block of workouts, Alex had another six day period of lighter volume riding to adapt to the prior work load leading into the Tour of Britain. This adaptation block began with two super easy effort rides of one and two hours respectively, followed by two days of specific workouts on the bike, but only 90 minutes and 150 minutes compared with the four to six hours rides in previous blocks of workouts. The Tour of Britain, as Alex notes “is always a hard week.” To emphasize this point, he observed that the total work load for the week was “higher than the first week of the Tour de France.” 33 hours of tough racing over eight grueling days puts an emphatic stamp on that point.
Tour of Britain
After another three day block of recovery rides following the Tour of Britain, Alex began two weeks of lighter workouts in preparation from the World Championships and the Worlds Mixed Relay event. This lighter block of riding provided Alex with a chance to adapt to the large work load from the Tour of Britain. Following Worlds, Alex next raced in the Tour of Croatia the last week of September and first week of October. “I wanted Croatia to be a big week, and it was,” noted Alex. “Sometimes in Croatia I was supplementing with extra rides around the race,” Alex added when noting that it was another 30-hour work load week.
A hard week of racing at the Tour of Croatia.
Immediately following the Tour of Croatia, Alex traveled to altitude for an eight day block of workouts, followed by the British National Time Trial Championships, and then another week at altitude for his final push prior to his hour record attempt. This second week at altitude is when the first evidence that the balance between his work load and the time spent adapting to the work load was askew. Specifically on October 19th, he notes that he felt like he had a good day of riding averaging over 320 watts for six hours, and “that was a real positive day…and things were coming good.” But then two days later on the 21st he missed his target power level during a 20 minute effort by almost 10%. His coach in retrospect noted that Alex was a bit cooked and underfed in the final hour of the big six hour ride on the 19th. Was that six hour ride simply too long? Did that final hour when Alex began to fatigue provide beneficially prime his body for improvement? Would exchanging that final hour of riding for an additional hour of adaptation time have allowed him to perform up to his target on the 21st? Each additional hour of adaptation time provides 4% more time for the body to adapt to a workout.
Alex’s final altitude riding block prior to the hour record attempt
Alex had an amazing ride in his hour record attempt, but came up just a bit short. Alex’s target effort level for the hour record was 340 watts based on wind tunnel testing, and it’s somewhat surprising that he wasn’t able to reach that level after averaging over 320 watts for six hours only weeks prior to the attempt.
Shifting your focus from training to adapting is challenging. Athletes are drilled into thinking that hard work produces improvements. And though it is true that hard work is required to prime the body for improvements, the improvements occur only when you are at rest and doing as little as possible. It’s challenging to simply avoid using the word training in a post on the subject. But, that shift might have helped Alex in his record attempt. Alex squeezed in a lot of long hard rides in the final two months leading up to his attempt, and consistently added extra riding time on race days. When you are question if you have done enough training, the convenient way to provide a satisfactory answer is by squeezing in extra riding time. But, that extra riding time comes at the cost of less time to rest, recover, adapt, and improve.