Do you have a plan?

"Fail to plan and you plan to fail". This saying has more importance than you realize.

In order to be successful at anything in life, especially sports, you must plan for it. Amongst other things, you must plan out your race schedule, your training schedule, and your training times. Then you must plan on the best way to make everything happen. "Winging it" only works for so long. The best athletes are the ones who have planned their success.

What's the first step in this planning process? Goal setting. You must set realistic yet challenging goals to keep you motivated and on track.

An example of a goal would be -
Eat healthy

That's a great goal, but how do you eat healthy? What are the steps to eating healthy and how do you know if you are doing it?

You must break your goals down into more goals and tasks. If your goal can be broken down, you are not finished making it.

In order to eat healthy, you must know what eating healthy means. A better goal would be-
I plan on buying more fruits and veggies to have on hand at home for snacking. I will stay away from highly processed (packaged, sugar filled) foods and buy more "natural" foods that have not been as processed. When I will always remember to eat a healthy snack (ie banana and milk) after my ride. Etc, etc.

Goals have to be broken down, and down, until all you have to do is follow the steps.
Plan to succeed.

Fix yourself now, so you can ride strong in 2010!

After a season of riding, racing, traveling in the van, car, and airplane your body is probably a bit out of whack. Sitting on the saddle followed by sitting in the car followed by sitting/laying on the couch can start to create muscle imbalances in your body. Now is the time to "fine tune" your body.

You may have muscle imbalances, flexibility imbalances (or both), pedal stroke imbalances, or mental training imbalances. If you have one imbalance, there is a good chance you have another one too.

Fix those imbalances so you can ride stronger in 2010.

Good "fixing" exercises include-
-Pilates (my favorite!)
-Yoga
-Massage
-Single leg pedaling
-Stretching
-REST
-Walking

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What does better fitness combined with more confident skills bring you?
Wins!
Such was the case for Athlete Mina over the wet, snowy, muddy weekend of CX racing here in Colorado.

Keep up the good work!

More Skills

Cyclocross is all about skills. If you've got them, you can get away with sub-par fitness. If you don't have the skills, you better have great fitness to get you through the entire race of using your energy to get through the technical sections.

However, if you've got both, you're golden.

11 year old Mina tuning in her CX skills before school.

Continue to work skills in with your training and recovery plan during the week. Every new skill will help you become a more confident rider and thus a faster rider too.

The bike change

Cyclocross is known for it's consistency to provide the racer with varying conditions. In turn, the racer needs to have a wide range of skills in their back pocket to handle the different courses, conditions and competition.

One of such CX skills needed is the ability to have both and "pit bike" and a "pit person". In extremely muddy races the ability to change bikes throughout the race is extremely necessary. The more mud that cakes on your bike will make it increasingly harder and harder to ride. The bike gets heavier, the tires get caked with mud and don't provide traction, and the drivetrain can get jammed and stop working or break.

However, if the racer is able to get a clean bike every few laps, they will be at a huge advantage. I clean bike can make the conditions seem not so bad, allowing the racer to go faster.

But there's a catch; in order to get a clean bike every few laps, the dirty bike must get cleaned. That's where the pit person comes in. The pit person is just as busy as the racer. He/she has less than 5 minutes to get the old bike, clean the old bike and hand it off to the racer before starting the process all over again with the original bike.

The bike change should be practiced and perfected before being used in an important race because if it is muddy and you have both a pit bike and a pit person, you should use them! It will help you.

Sand in your pedals

Athlete Renee braved the snowstorm and went out and raced at the Boulder Reservoir. She and Coach Alison learned all about riding/running in the sand.

Both women's pedals got gunked up by the sand and they either couldn't clip out (Alison) or couldn't clip in (Renee). The solution? Loosen pedals and spray some lube in there. They may be too loose for other conditions, but with the sand/mud they will work perfectly. Just make sure to tighten the next time you ride.

Make your own!

Barriers...the roadies demise.
How to do you learn to like the barriers? By being good at them!
How do you get to "be good at them"?
Practice!

"But where do I practice barriers" you may be asking. The simple answer is... at home! Make your own barriers! Use what you have at home or what's close to home. That's the great thing about Cross riding; it can be done anywhere!

No excuses!