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.

The same goes for training.  Do you know what you're training for and why you're doing what you're doing this time of year?  Know exactly what you're training for (your goal), then break it down into smaller pieces and train for each piece.

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

Alabama Cycling Camp

It's official.  ALP Cycles is headed to Alabama in February for the Alabama Cycling Camp.
Join Coach AP the weeks of Feb. 5-12 and/or Feb. 12-19 for amazing riding, training tips, race tactics and an overall really fun time.

The roads in Alabama are perfect to get in your early season miles. Time spent here is an excellent way to start off your season. After riding a big amount of miles in the rolling hills, you're ready to put in the intensity that will turn into race wins in the coming season.

Check out the website for more information.  It is fun and productive, plus we're looking forward to riding with great people.

Injuries

Unfortunately, injuries are a part of athletics.  They are also a part of living and of life.

Obviously, prevention (stretching, strengthening, massage, rest, etc) is the best way to avoid injuries.  But sometimes, no matter how well you have "prevention-ed", injuries still happen.  In this case, there are two ways you can go about healing your injury.

1.)  Take some IB Profen, and call it good.  Option #1 people continue their activities despite the pain/injury.  They half-ass the activity because it hurts, and they half-ass their healing by doing the activity.  In this instance the injury lingers.  It could take days, weeks or even months to recover from this at one time, not so bad injury.

2.) Rest until injury no longer hurts. Option #2 people understand they would rather rest/heal today to exercise tomorrow, and the day after, all while being pain free. In this instance, the injury has time to recover and to heal and the overall duration of the injury is shorter.

Injuries are your body's way of telling you something is not right.  Take time to listen what your body is saying and take the necessary measures to fix that problem so it never hinders you again.