Coach Curly Training Principles - Planning

Good Friday "Only 8 hours of work left in your day" racers! Ol' Curly is real sorry for yesterday's rant... It was unavoidable. The Green Valley TT is tomorrow... something to celebrate. Ol' Curly is gonna do it but knows that the fitness is not there. Gotta keep on keepin' on though.

How's yer training going? It occurred to me yesterday that there's something to using the instructional design principles I use at work and training principles for cycling. Joe Friel has been monopolizing the industry with his "scientific" approach. It's time Ol' Curly's applied good ol' ID expertise to this "old skool" sport. Ol' Curly will use the definition of "Training" to help us build our program. Training is "knowledge and skills" to be used in our current job at hand. NOT future stuff... that's called "Development" we can do that too... but you have to know the difference.

OK... so first we develop our "Learning Objectives". Now under Friel's program you set "goals"... In my program... we'll do Learning Objectives.

1. To go 30mph with the pack
2. Finish a PR (with the S-turn) with the pack
3. TT at 26mph average speed on a flat course

Next we'll develop our test. You always do the book ends first in training. What do you want to do and how the hell are you gonna measure success? Well... in our case we have plenty of TT's for that third one and the others you could measure at a PR weekly race.

Now we have to back fill the middle with "content" or activities that help us achieve our objectives. Things like "going 30mph by yourself" intervals, Big Gear intervals, Tempo rides, etc. You could use weekly races and training on the track to help you as well. The point is that your objective drives the activities and interactions and not the other way around. Now you can still ride slow during the winter... We can develop an objective for that too.

Now to further complicate our program, there are 6 other things that help us perform. Things like incentives and counter-incentives, setting expectations, conditions, etc. Training is only one way to get performance. Think of a rider with natural abilities... they never train but they still keep kicking your ass... They could probably use some training to get better but they already possess the "skills and knowledge" to kick our ass. For the purposes of this blog... we'll only use the "Training" piece of the performance pie. This whole thing boils down to us evaluating at season's end... our objectives... how many did we hit? Did we do any activities that didn't help us? Which ones did help us?

Your Training: Identify your Learning Objectives... and wish Strangleland a Happy Birthday. I was gonna try to make him a video... but there's just too many sick people at the Curly Ranch right now.