It’s Friday afternoon, and in just about 16 hours and seven days, I’m going to be standing on the startline of my fourth Leadville 100 mountain bike race. My conditioning is pretty good, maybe not what it was last year, but not bad either. And with three completed Leadvilles, including one faster than nine hours, I’m not worried about the course or even the weather. But now that I’m entering the final week before the event, I have to be careful not to fall into a trap that ensnares a lot of racers: the pre-race panic.
The pre-race panic happens when athletes suddenly lose confidence in their preparation for an event and start trying to cram in extra training in the final 7-10 days before an event. The truth of the matter is that there is little or nothing I can do within the next week that will appreciably improve my actual fitness. An extra interval session or two will not miraculously provide 5-10 more watts at lactate threshold, and even a crash diet to lose a few pounds would likely only leave me weak instead of light and strong.
It takes time for training to start yielding visible improvements because it takes time for your body to recover from efforts and adapt to them. In some ways you can think of it in terms of momentum. Fitness has momentum, it takes some effort to get it moving in the right direction, and even when you stop pushing, it continues to move forward for while.
The fitness I have right now is the fitness I have, and there’s nothing I can do about it in the next week. But what I can influence is how rested I am on the startline. And this is where a lot of athletes screw up. If I get impatient or lose confidence in my preparation, I’ll go out and test myself on every little climb, push myself through interval sessions I don’t really need, and generally ride harder than I need to. I’ll do this because I need to feel fast and powerful now in order to have the confidence that I’ll be fast and powerful next week.
But if I do all of that, and test myself on every ride over the next week, I’ll be exhausted on race day. The fitness will still be there, but I won’t be able to utilize it fully because there will be a layer of fatigue shrouding it.
Rest is what I can control from this point through to the start of the Leadville 100, and if I focus on making sure I stay relaxed, loose on the bike, well fed, hydrated, and rested, I’ll stand on the start line optimally prepared to utilize the fitness I’ve developed.
Chris Carmichael
Celebrate Lance Armstrong’s successful comeback with a Special Bonus on top of CTS’s Create Your Own Comeback program.
Looking forward to see how it goes for you!