Maintenance during cross season

[BryanF]

Same thing happens me year after year...and I feel it happening now...

I go into the fall relatively fit (for a hack with kids and a 60 hour/week job) and I end up losing it as the cross season unfolds. I'll shell myself on the weekend, manage a recovery ride Monday, squeeze in maybe a solid couple hours and an interval session on Tues/Wed and then I need to lay off at the end of the week to feel fresh to race. Given mid week time constraints and late night working/stress it's just not good enough and I end up sliding backwards...every mid Nov I also end up sick...every year.

What do you guys do during the season? Should I force more solid riding early in the week and not worry so much about tapering in order to be rested for race day? I'm 45 now, so I do find I need rest times to hit it hard on the weekends. Do you keep up w intervals mid week if you race the weekends?

[holliscx]

Two options:

a) come into fall 100% fit so you finish the season where you're starting now i.e. relatively fit or b) retire and buy a gravel bike

One of the nice things about cross is training doesn't require the hours that road racing does. What about racing mtb if fall / winter is tough w/ limited daylight

Something is better than nothing - on a positive note you're probably beating other dads w/ kids and long hours at work

What if you worked fewer hours with > productivity and parlayed some of that time towards your riding

[BryanF]

I guess I'm asking how much aerobic maintenance people do during cross season...you know, longer, slower rides. I'm focussed on keeping up midweek intervals (which are easy to fit into my schedule) but it feels like general fitness is starting to slide....

[roseyscot]

are you maybe doing more intervals than during the summer and not taking it as easy as you should on the recovery days? maybe it's a matter of your body being tired, not so much about losing fitness. cx races are usually pretty intense efforts, so coupled with midweek intervals, you really ought to be giving yourself plenty of low effort, little ring spinning time (I say as I ride too hard to get home at a reasonable hour).

[Delicious]

I find the most important thing for me during a cross season is to be well rested to race again on the weekend, particularly if I'm doing doubles. The fact that you always end up sick probably has something to do with your body giving up after the continuous walloping racing weekend after weekend wreaks on you (though having germ machines bringing bugs home from school never helps).

I just had this same discussion with some other folks the other day so I dug into the archives and was surprised at what I found. During the 12 weeks of cross season last year I rode less than 20 times mid-week. Total. Only a handful of those were what I would call "training", usually in the form of a Wednesday Worlds practice. Mostly it was commuting to work or doing an hour on the rollers after the kid(s) were asleep. On non-race weekends I would try to get in an endurance type ride and one short one with race like intensity. I never do structured intervals on a week sandwiched between race weekends. Some of my best races were after a week (M-F) completely off the bike.

Bear in mind I may be slightly anomalous in that I typically only ride 5-6 hours a week during the summer to train for cross season. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the "less is more" plan. A lot of the guys I race against are riding doing more like 8-12 hour weeks coming into the cross season by comparison.