How to Optimize Training During Your Thanksgiving (Holiday) Break
With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up for most of the WRA athlete family, a conversation we have with our athletes is about time available to train or workout over the holiday, since most folks are off from work or school. Practically everyone wants to ride more with this extra time!
In fact, we have folks who want to do more “base,” which is understandable.
Some folks want to play catch up on things missed in training, or they intend to “put some extra time in the bank.”
As coaches, we generally like when folks want to do more. While just doing more for the sake of doing more has limited benefit, it is an endurance sport, so riding more does help. That said, unless you’re going to ride more regularly (which then becomes your norm), there is limited benefit to an extra 5-7 hours or so for one week at this time of year. While it’ll help everyone to ride more, in practically every case, the benefit of the extra hours on this one week fades away by mid-December or so.
There’s training, which is the workouts and exercises we do, but there’s also coaching, and that’s the advice to get through training and racing, as well as how to take care of ourselves to be the best athlete we can be, and to help us better reach our goals.
The coaching advice here is to consider that if you’re visiting family or having family visit over this holiday, or even if it is just some extra time with your partner, significant other, your kids…anyone important to you. During the course of a year or season for a bike racer, we spend some real time training and away racing. This might be a better opportunity than grabbing a few extra hours to spend that time with these loved ones who are important to us, particularly if they support us in our pursuit of our cycling goals.
Or, consider doing an easier ride with someone close who rides, but maybe isn’t on your level. Would that extra time riding with someone who isn’t as strong as you potentially benefit them more than the few extra hours would for you?
From a training standpoint, I’ll put looser defined workouts or less structured training in place for a few days when someone is in a new or unfamiliar area. Instead of adding stress to make a workout fit, we can still get in meaningful ride time while enjoying the new or different surroundings, roads, and trails without having to be a slave to the readout on the head unit.
If your regular routine is solid, you don’t have to panic train when you have a few days off from work or school. Instead, you can use it as rest or recovery, but more importantly, you can spend that time with those you are thankful to have in your life.
Being a badass is more about your day to day than cramming training in on a couple days off of work or school.
- Christian Williams