“Unleash Your Savage Fury” – Michael Brauner
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King Poser training tips
Want training tips from an actual coach, click here, or for masters here. Read on for tips from an old Poser who has gone from watching the finishes, to putting it in the top ten now and again. It wasn’t EPO… it was hard work and Guinness Stout.
Training – working married guy
Due to family and job obligations my training has always been on the edge, as in – I’m always on the edge of falling out of shape. I generally balance four days of commuting with two days of actual training. Saturdays I train fairly hard and Sundays I go all out. When I get the occasional Tuesday club ride in it’s a big bonus. It’s a battle to always put in quality mileage, getting quantity when I can. Club rides with groups of people are always preferred on a schedule such as mine because they tend to pack in all the aspects you need to work on. Speed, intervals, recovery and some tactics.
Data
- Didn’t finish a race for my first two years (12 races)
- Never been a full time cyclist
- Never had a coach or any formal training
- Four years Little Five Hundred (8th with The Posers in 87)
- Commuting has been the core of my training for 10 years
- Compete in Road, Track, Crits and Cross
- Track was intended to enhance my training, but then I got addicted
Basics
- Sleep – in bed by ten when peaking for an event
- Diet – try to keep peaks and valleys in check with a steady, healthy diet. Avoid huge meals ( took me awhile to realize the guys in the Tour need 8,000 calories, not Sunday crit riders!)
- Quality over quantity (for us part timers)
- Heart rate over gear size
- Sturdy functional equipment (stop laughing my new bikes only five years old)
Favorite workouts:
A little heavy on power as it was not until late in my cycling career that I discovered that mileage does matter. The older I got the more these workouts faded and the more long club rides I did in there place.
Mosers – in honor of that beverage guzzlin big gear mashing macho man
- Put it in the biggest gear ya got, pick a pole down the road and from a track stand sprint as hard as you can
- Rinse lather repeat, not but twice but until you puke
Hill intervals – short hills, power stuff of course
- Find one or two very steep hills (boat ramps here in Chicago)
- Warm-up at least a half hour
- Do ten climbs using progressively harder gears
- Your last climb should be in full vicious mode, if your fading before that then your done.
- If you have a few weeks recovery time go ahead and do a few while your totally blown.
Pyramid – Velodrome, or road if you must
- Get a good warm-up in, ~30min
- Start with a thirty second hard effort
- Rest thirty seconds
- Hard 45 seconds
- Rest 45 seconds
- Hard for 1 minute
- Rest for 1 minute
- And so on until 2-3min
- Never rest more than 2 minutes even if you go as high as 5
- Then reverse the order…
- Hard for 2:45
- Rest for 2 minutes
- Hard for 2:30
- Rest for 2 minutes
- etc.
Leg speed
- Do group rides in the small chain ring
- Take the front on downhill’s and hammer
- If Solo, spin downhill’s
- Ride tailwinds in a smaller gear than normal keeping a steady high cadence as long as possible
- Shred your rollers at the high steady cadence’s
Fixed Gear
- Fixed gear seemed to hinder me more than it helped. I did it only in a commuting situation (with brakes!) which was probably a mistake, but my road time is to precious on the weekends. I believe it hindered because due to my limited training I needed all the gear pushing I can get.
Wintertime Workouts:
Indoor power cycle – modeled after / stolen from a Roger Young workout
- 20min warm-up on rollers
- 1min intervals on rollers (progressively bigger gears)
- 30 seconds rest
- 1min lifting weights
- 30 sec rest
- 1min interval on rollers
- 30 sec rest
- 1min squats
- 30 sec rest
- 1min interval on rollers
- repeat cycle for thirty minutes
- 10 min warm down
Chicago Lakefront body blaster
This ride will vastly sharpen your handling skills, it will absolutely make your upper body suffer as never before and your legs will develop strength from all the start and stops. The Goal is to make the ride without falling over, I’ve done it once but have also had rides where I’ve fallen 10 times, only once into the lake on an ice ride…
> Chicago bike trails lakefront map
- MTB or Cross bike only
- Hit the Lakefront Bike trail at Hollywood and Lakeshore Dr.
- Head for the beach and hit the breakwater wall
- Put it in the small chain ring, prepare to suffer
- Weave, bob, hop, and negotiate till it ends
- Part one ends at Montrose harbor, at this point you may no longer feel your hands or forearms.
- Head back to the wall after Montrose harbor and continue till the Addison boat ramp.
- If it’s cold enough your reward is smoking the beaches from Belmont south which become like Salt Flats in cold weather, sorry bikini’s or Speedo’s to be found…
- Continue to North Street beach where you can ride the frozen sand moguls that are all over the beach.
- Your arms will ache as never before when done with this ride, as you may have hoped the front end about 2,000 times.
Bike trail stair stomper
- Take the bike path from North or south to Caldwell woods, at Milwaukee and Devon.
- If you don’t have a good enough warm-up hit the old CycloCross trails at the East side behind the pool Or on the Northwest side by the park they’re are trails north of the creek… yes we’re banned from doing cross at USCF/ABR sanctioned Cross at Caldwell and yes they’ve put down gravel and fences but there’s still some trails to work.
- Now for the workout: In the big open field below the old water slide you’ve got five set’s of stairs leading out.
- Riding south out of the field dismount and take the first set of stairs out (Metal grid next to the slide)
- Drop back into the field on the dirt path next to the stairs.
- Do a recovery loop and hit the next set of stairs, descend on it’s accompanying dirt trail.
- Repeat in a clockwise fashion until you reach the last set of stairs on the far west side of the field, these steps are huge and you should really be feeling it on the top four or five.
- Take the necessary recovery time (not more than 5minutes) and repeat
- Ride home
Do the training Yo!
