Page 17 - DLNnov2016-1012

East German track coach Heiko Salzwedel (then working with a road team)
believed in a mix of long (250kms) endurance rides and (separate) speed
sessions, focusing on higher cadence and short, high-intensity intervals. He
also thought the body should go through all the training zones, from resting
to full-on effort, before breakfast. So the riders would get up at 6am and
go for a ride. Typically, they’d ride 10 minutes easy then pick it up a bit –
medium intervals, higher intervals, flat-out sprints. It would take about 45
minutes and would set the body up for the main workout later in the day…

At GAN, Denis Roux told Jens “you don’t get dropped because you can’t
race for 5 hours at 42kph, you get dropped because you can’t ride for 10
minutes at 55-60kph”. His focus was on sustaining high-intensity efforts
and recovering from them/lactic acid build-up quickly. Denis was a fan of
2-hour turbo-trainer sessions (even Jens found them mentally hard, which
makes me feel a bit better!)

Typical session:
· Warm-up 20mins.

· Training block – repeat 6 times (2 hours)

Ø 4.5 minute big gear effort at 80rpm and heart rate around 180bpm to
simulate big climbing effort

Ø sprint flat out for 30secs over the “summit”.

Ø 15 minutes at 100rpm

Another favourite was 10 x 1km flat-out intervals with full recovery between,
to accustom the body to the efforts involved in getting into a break.

Roux also favoured Jacques Anquetil’s old favourite – training behind a
scooter/derny. This forces you to practise turning a big gear at high cadence,
as in a race. You can also do intervals by attacking the scooter then you
get to practice recovering while riding behind it at race speed when it catches
you.

17