Having decided which events you want to enter you can then plan best how to prepare for them.

By this stage in the year, ideally, you’ll have done a lot of fairly easy riding to develop your endurance, and it’s time to work now on developing power and then speed.

It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the 53 ring – if you’re riding on the road, in a ride of between 1 and 2 hours, put in 4 or 5 bursts of 5 or 10 minutes hard riding, with the rest of your riding fairly easy. Please don’t try this on a Sunday club run or the group will split apart. It’s good also to try some 5, 10 or 15 second flat out sprints, and on the flat, this might be in a gear of 53x16 or 17.

So what if Sunday is the only time you can get out on the road and you hate riding on your own? This is the value of a turbo trainer – warm up for l0 minutes in a very low gear, then choose a fairly high gear, perhaps 53x15 and pedal with time trial intensity for 4 mins, then do 4 mins in low gear at high cadence, another 4 mins hard burst and keep alternating until you’ve done 5 hard bursts and warm down for 10 mins. As the season gets closer, make your hard bursts slightly higher than you could sustain in a time trial and gradually work on cutting down the period of easy riding between bursts. If you have a turbo that you can lock on a particular wattage, use this facility, then you can experiment with which is the best cadence for you to sustain a given wattage.

Time trialling is about saving seconds, so practise cornering fast, negotiating roundabouts, particularly the ones where you go ‘round and back’ as you do at the turn on ‘out and back’ time trial courses.

Many riders waste time either going too slow at the start of time trials, or more often, too fast, and then find that after a half mile they feel like death and have to back off, so practise starts. I suggest that you start in a relatively low gear, definitely no higher than 53x17, and more likely 53x19, or even lower.

Many riders relatively new to time trialling state their aim for the season to beat the hour for a 25 or do either a 23 or even a 22 for a 10. I’ve done this myself and got a great thrill from achieving such times for the first time but there are several things you need to bear in mind. First, there aren’t any really fast courses very close to here, and if you need to shave 2 mins off your 25 time or 1 min off your 10 time, you’ll need those courses. This means that you are likely to need to go over onto the A1 near Newark on a Saturday afternoon– where the road is flat, the surface is good and there’s very heavy traffic. Even then, you’re dependent on weather conditions and some riders get obsessed with the idea of getting that fast time and on a windy day give up before they’ve started - they think that times will be slow, forgetting the fact that time trialling is about doing faster times than other riders ‘on the day’. They go back week after week hoping for the perfect day.

So what is the perfect day – well the most important component is you – you arrive well trained, well rested and in a positive frame of mind – not easy to do week in week out. It’s a day where air resistance is at its lowest. Air pressure might range between 970 mbs and 1040 mbs which represents a 6% difference in resistance. Temperature might range between 0ºC and 28ºC, which represents a 9% difference in resistance, and the difference between high an low humidity represents a 1% of resistance. So the ideal day has high temperatures, low air pressure and high humidity and if you get that day, you can knock up to 3 mins off your 25 time. There aren’t many days like this, even around balmy Newark – the one thing you can be sure of on the A1 is being overtaken by lots of HGVs and the ‘suck’ from these certainly makes you go faster.

And just one other thing, if you’ve not done a fast time over the last 3 years, you can only be sure of getting your entry accepted for a ‘middle markers’ or ‘slowest 120’ event.

So you still want to do it? I suggest you plan your races in now for the whole season and sort out two 25s, perhaps in consecutive weeks in June, and two 10s in August/September and arrange your training so that you peak for these. I’ll put something about ‘top end’ speed training and peaking in May’s newsletter, but if you can’t wait, give me a call.

Just one other thing – you might have wondered exactly why coaches go on about the value of learning to pedal faster – especially for gnarled old veteran time triallists – I’ve wondered myself from time to time. An explanation which will satisfy all was given at a course I recently attended – think of those days when on one leg of a time trial there’s a howling tail wind and when you’ve finished, you say you could have done with more gears. If you could pedal at 120 rpm rather than at 90 rpm, that’s worth at least 2 more gears. We are of course talking about hard pedalling, not just spinning the legs round!

Dave Birch
February 2005