By Melanie McQuaid
Feb. 6, 2007 --
Over the past week I was very lucky to join 30 avid cyclists and seven triathletes on a weeklong camp in Temecula, California, at the Temecula Creek Inn. Hosted by Floyd Landis in his hometown and organized by Saris, this camp was as close as you can come to living like a professional road cyclist. There was a mechanic, four soigneurs, fitness and physical testing, two coaches, all prepared meals, nightly seminars and fully supported rides.
In addition to Floyd, coach Alan Lim, coach Robbie Ventura, athlete Will Smith and Saris gurus David Cathcart, Jesse Bartholomew and Lance Niles were there to answer any and all questions from training to hardware to software.
It was a dream camp, to be sure. It was so great for me to spend a week focused on cycling to help boost my fitness for the upcoming season. Plus, Floyd has a great personality and is a great guy, so the camp had a very cool vibe. It felt like I was back in my days as a pure cyclist.
There are about a million answers of what to do over the winter to improve your performance. As long as you know why you are doing something, you can make it work for you. I tend to stick to a volume-based program with efforts held to 85 percent of max to help me build sub-threshold aerobic capacity for about three months or so. I find that with a program that includes a lot of swimming and running it is very difficult to get weeks of cycling in that really challenge me, since I am physically not capable of a 45-hour training week. To remedy that situation, I plan a seven-day cycling camp every four weeks, where I maintain the swim and run with about three sessions of each and smash the cycling with four- and five-hour rides every day. In this way I can push my yearly cycling mileage up to almost where I was as a cyclist, while still maintaining and building my fitness for the other two legs of a triathlon.
I managed to train 27 hours on the bike at the camp, with 40,000 feet of climbing (maybe more). It was incredible. Although this was a lot of riding, it wasn’t necessarily hard riding. We did two major climbs of over 18km (I did one twice) and rode on a lot of rolling terrain to get this kind of climbing in. On the first day of the camp Alan Lim did step tests with PowerTaps to assess lactate-threshold wattages, which, in conjunction with a field test, helped to sort the group out for training rides. This meant everyone would ride with people of similar ability and kept the pace appropriate for everyone in each group. With only one week of work I can already feel my fitness on the bike coming back.
If you live in a region where you can end up on the trainer for months at a time, doing mileage camps once or twice during the winter can help you boost your fitness quickly and help you keep your sanity. Riding at Floyd’s camp got me fired up about racing. So as we get closer and closer to race season, ensure that you maintain objectivity in your training. Do what is right for you, but make sure it is challenging. There is no substitute for hard work in this sport.
Based in Victoria, Canada, Melanie McQuaid is a three-time defending XTERRA world champion. For more information about McQuaid, please visit www.racergirl.com
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