Even before Nationals, Caleb Swartz was having an
exceptional 2015-16 CX Season. As a coach, this is what you hope for, he’s a
good kid, he does the work and he’s incredibly positive and motivated. But how
did he get there? It was a long time in the making for sure. I’ve been working
with Caleb for a few years now, and 2015 and 2016 have been in our sights for a
while now. But specifically I want to take a quick look at 2015 and what we
did. There is a lot to cover so I'll be splitting this into multiple posts. Today let start with volume.
When it comes to training, volume refers to the
amount of training. There are a lot of ways to measure this such as time,
distance, and stress to name a few. Generally I use time, stress and, subjective
measures of fatigue to understand the capacity and load of volume. So lets take
a look at what Caleb had this year.
Time:
As a junior, it’s important to be careful when it comes to
all measures of volume, especially with time when you factor in he is still
going to school, has friends and family commitments. But the goal with volume
for Caleb was to help transition him from the shorter rides which he had become
accustomed to, into the longer rides that were going to help him increase his
endurance and fitness not only this year, but down the road. We did this by
starting with increasing the number of rides, but not increasing the length of
any particular rides. That meant a lot of 1-2 hour rides early in the season.
As the base period progressed, we started introducing a few of the longer
rides, such as 3-4 hours. It might surprise people that Caleb only clocks in a
handful of rides over 3 hours, and most of those were on his own will, not
prescribed. It was the consistency that helped him improve fitness and
endurance.
Stress:
I measure stress with a handful of metrics, but they all
help me manage pushing athletes the correct amount, and in the correct ways.
The easiest thing to do when training is to do too much too soon. With Caleb,
he would definitely out ride himself if there wasn’t someone there holding him
back a little. And that was my goal, to keep him hungry. Combine that with a
long MTB season before CX, it meant a long slow build, as much as possible. We
also didn’t have much previous data to work with, so I needed to be careful about
pushing him too much, because essentially we were in uncharted territory.
Notice the slow and steady build, keeping the stress balance
(yellow) right in the -5 to -20 area. This is certainly not pushing someone
super hard, but every time I told him to ride, he couldn’t wait. Managing
stress is connected to managing fatigue which in turn manages motivation.
Fatigue:
As I mentioned above, keeping the stress low and manageable helped
keep Caleb motivated through the year. I almost never heard him asking me to
take it easy. But in the later part of the year it was time to push him more to
get the speed and power to come out for the main event, Cyclocross. You’ll
notice that in the later part of the season the Stress balance spent a lot more
time in the -30 to -40 range at times. As a junior, care needs to be taken, and
there was a lot of focus placed on keeping careful track of how he felt. Part
of becoming an athlete is learning to listen to your body and know when fatigue
is good and when it’s bad.
Next time we'll look at what roll intensity played.
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