Tonkin on training: Don’t stress out

[Erik Tonkin]

Sometimes, you just gotta wait for it. Here’s the situation…

When I was out of town racing the other weekend, I heard that back home my pal Jeffrey was sick and couldn’t race. He’d trained well at our Thursday early morning ‘cross practice, and he was excited for the weekend’s two races, neither of which were big, hyper ‘Cross Crusade events and so were tailor-made for training.

Falling ill wasn’t part of the plan.

He skipped the first race, hoping to be better for the Sunday event. He wasn’t better. In fact, he only got worse, even missing work on Monday. He was forced off the bike for over a week. What had been his essential training block for the early ‘cross season had crumbled to pieces. He raced last weekend at Hillsboro, but…he wasn’t where he wanted to be.

[Tonkin at Hillsboro, 10/15/06]

But that’s O.K. He knew he wouldn’t be back to his original form, but that didn’t stop him from racing. Jeff went out there because he was feeling better. He was now nearly two weeks behind in his training, but he didn’t stress out too much over it. He figured that it’s better late than never. And he’s right.

This week, Jeff’s fully recovered and his motivation is good. He doesn’t have a lot of time given his teaching job, so he’s twice put in tough, compact interval sessions. These workouts are gut-busters—they’re no nonsense and no fun, and offer no excuses. The pay-off comes later.

Now, on to the training…

[Tonkin over the barricades]

Our Thursday morning ‘cross practice is a good example of what one of these workouts might look like. We have a well-worn, compact ‘cross course set up in a local park. The time to get around the parcours is only about 3 minutes, but the loop has everything you need for ‘cross. We take the start line as a group, just like in a race except the slower riders take the front. Then, we race flat out for 3 or 4 laps and stop. The effort only lasts 8 to 12 minutes. We wait for everybody to finish the last lap, take a very short breather and a few sips, and we do it again…and then again.

The quality of the effort stays high because nobody gets left too far behind on the loop: as soon as big gaps open up, the interval is over. Also, we begin each interval at full speed to practice our start-line “jumps”. By the middle point of the season, we hope to do as many as 4 sets of 4, which means about 45 minutes of high quality effort, which is close to what you would do in an actual race. Until then, we end the workout when our collective output tails off.

This morning, we changed it up a little. After the first set of 4, we practiced starts. They’re kinda ugly. We all line up at one end of a short soccer field, count it down, race to the other end, turn around the goal, and race back to where we started. We did that 5 times, each effort lasting well under a minute. Some of the guys do the drill in a gear combo that’s extra light while others go extra heavy—the point is to train your weaknesses. I, of course, went extra light.

[Tonkin focuses while
in first]

My legs are slow as molasses, and shaving them isn’t gonna be enough to change that sad fact. Then, we returned to the course and did a set of 3. Guys were dragging. All totaled, we did maybe 25 minutes of actual hard training and were out for less than an hour, but nobody there would have wanted to do more. Most of the gang commuted at least 10 minutes there and back, so they got in a warm-up and cool-down. And Jeffrey, by the way, was looking—and riding—pretty good!

What makes the whole mess palatable as well as productive is the company and competition. It’s hard to solitarily push yourself to the puking point at 7:15am—especially if it’s dark, wet and cold outside. A fair amount of horsing around livens up the action.

I know I’m more than capable of doing hard workouts by myself, and I always use a computer to keep me honest. But that said I find training with others invaluable. If I can sucker someone into doing a hard workout with me, then I know I’ll be the better for it. I think it must be the moral support, safety in numbers, or something like that. In fact, this past Saturday is a perfect example.

I had it in my head last week to do my favorite two hour training ride—a ride I regularly do solo. I tried to go out on Thursday and then on Friday, but I had nothing. I couldn’t do it. I was getting frustrated with myself because I felt like I was wasting a perfectly good week for training. Then at the shop on Friday, a friend called and said he go early with me on Saturday. I got the workout in that I needed and made it to work in plenty of time. Sure, Thursday’s probably a better day for such an effort, but at least I got it in sometime during the week and before race day. I just had to be flexible and patient. I must admit that I was stressing it a little, but once I made it out there—even though it was late in the game, so to speak—I was fine.

[Author’s note: The next article will be about setting goals and making them happen. After all, we are training for some reason. There is, I guess, an end to all this “better late than never” and “something’s better than nothing” chatter!]