Time to Reset and Train to Train

I’ve written in previous blogs about my goals post World Championships and how this time is meant to be a time to reset.

This has been difficult for me, and I’ve had to change how I think about my training and up coming season. As much as I want to do what it takes to be better, my natural response to that isn’t always what it should be. This is all another way of saying this period of reset is starting to come together for me.

I’m learning to work on my short comings. That is NOTHING new as it’s always on my mind, but in a different way this time. Right now I’m spending a lot of time on the bike but with very low intensity. My coach has to constantly remind me of the benefits of this. Long rides but steady ones. My tendency was to have efficient rides – harder on the hills, with increased cadence on the hills and other things I worked on last season. But I’ve had to back off and frankly ride in a way that’s inefficient during a race but super beneficial right now as I train my body to train with a ton more intensity come January. I’m starting to see the benefits of this – and the reinforcement that you need a good external coach to beat a dead horse (me being that dead horse sometimes).

The other items that is key right now is to experiment with new things. This is the time to try new equipment, and hypothesize on what you can change with your set up to make you faster. This is much more difficult during the season as we are so focused on the intensity of our training and meeting our numbers. Long, low intensity rides have allowed me to brainstorm much more and I have some fantastic new ideas! Thanks to Possabilities, I may be able to implement some of these ideas!