Kick off

So the purpose of this blog is to log some of my training and discuss some training-related concepts as I (hopefully) get consistently faster.

I'm targeting the UK national 10 and 25 mile TT championships this year, and it will be my first year of time trialling. I started cycling four years ago to race duathlon, and gave up duathlon when I finally accepted that I was a much better cyclist than runner. I wasn't a bad runner but cycling always came much more easily. My training always focused more heavily on running as that was where I needed to improve the most. I was tired of short-changing my cycling and decided to see how much faster I would be if I narrowed my focus to cycling alone.

I've changed my approach to training over the past few months, which has coincided with the start of a new job that has proved, as expected, to be busy and challenging. It's been difficult to find enough time to train and my schedule varies a lot from week to week. This has forced me to re-examine my training on two fronts. The first is my motivation for training, which I'll talk about some other time. I suspect my reasons are similar to a lot of others. The second is the issue of how to train as efficiently as possible. Without the luxury of time to train a lot, I've realised that the following principles are vital to making progress:

1. Train very easy or train very hard.
2. Train specifically. This means training at intensities that are specific to both the events you compete in and the physiological characteristics you wish to improve.
3. Be flexible. If you have an erratic schedule, embrace it. Trying to impose a rigid weekly training schedule on a highly variable work schedule is a losing proposition.

They're not earth-shattering, but keeping these principles in mind has been a big help over the past few months. I'm going to leave it there for now but will be posting a summary of recent training soon.