Plan, Prepare, Perform; Performance Is No Accident

Once you have a goal that you are training for (read about SMART goal setting), reaching that goal is not by chance. Having a good day is not an accident! A good day is the result of proper planning. In order to have a "really good" day (like on the day of your big event) there is a lot of planning and preparing that needs to occur first. So, let's look at what it takes to have that good day, and let's see what goes into a plan.

On the day of the event you want to have 2 things. Fitness and freshness.

Fitness is gained over time. There is no short cut to fitness. Carefully increasing training over many weeks and months will lead to increased fitness. It is VERY important to incorporate RECOVERY with the training. That is where the "carefully" comes in. If you didn't need recovery you could just go out and ride 200 miles and be stronger at the end than at the beginning. This is not how it works. You need to apply a stress and then recover. Only following recovery will you be more fit.

Freshness requires the above mentioned recovery along with some sharpening. Recovery alone will not bring peak readiness. Recovery will remove fatigue that accumulates as you apply training load. However, when you back things off it can lead to the feeling of being "stale" or "flat". You need to "sharpen up" to really be on for the big day.

Let's count backward from race day to see how to schedule that "really good" day.

• The day before the big event you want to do a "leg opener" which includes several elevated pace efforts to remind your body about the work it will be doing the next day. (I think of this as the "warning shot")
• Two days prior to the event you really want to take it easy.
• The week of the big event you want to include several workouts that are near race pace but are much shorter in duration. You want to give your body stimulus to make sure it can go hard.
• Two weeks prior to the event you want to have a lower intensity and shorter duration week. This lower training volume will remove fatigue.
• Weeks 3 & 4, or weeks 3, 4, & 5 prior to the event are higher intensity and/or duration applying a stress that your body will respond to during the upcoming recovery phase.
• Continuing backward you want to repeat the stress/recover cycle.

With proper planning you can prepare for the big day. Then all of the components will come together to create the performance. Performance is not an accident, it can be planned!

In future installments we will discuss what some of the components of the stress and recover phases are. We'll also talk about how different types of events and different types of athletes require different types of training to give each individual the best results.

This training tip also to be featured on: www.CenturionCycling.com/training