Upon returning from a couple of weeks in the great outdoors (I did not sleep inside for an entire weekend for like six weeks straight or something nutty like that), I sat down to work out a proper training plan. A proper training plan can span as many as six months, but the first thing I realized was that I only had five weeks. Oops! Should have looked into this sooner.

As I “train” all year, this wouldn’t be too big a deal; my base fitness was great and I had been doing the right things – mountain biking, long rides, and spending a good amount of time at elevation in the course of regular living / being outdoorsy.

Having been (and I suppose still being) a certified running coach, I’m well versed in the creation of training plans. Grab a blank calendar off the Internet, grab a pencil (this is very important), mark your race date, work backwards with a taper week or two, account for all travel or interruptions, fit in some long stuff, fit in some short and hard stuff, and keep going all the way back to the day you’re making the plan.

What I came up with was this:

A workout or two per week, some strength (kettlebells and pull-ups [I can do like a million now – funny because they were the only reason I always failed to get those stupid fitness patches growing up – hoping to do some rock gym after all of this to put this new skill to good use), some time in the elevation gym (I did a good amount of science reading before committing to this – it’s supported), and long rides or races every weekend. I also cut running out as I wanted to put all my leg energy into the pedals. Kind of excited to get back to that! I haven’t been excited to run in probably six years.

As this was my first ever cycling plan, I learned some things:

• It’s much harder to check the boxes each day. Cycling takes a lot more time than running, thus being much harder to fit it in if it’s not your top focus each day.
• I don’t know what a cycling taper looks like. I reached out to pretty much the best women’s mountain biker in the world for advice (she also does Leadville and coaching), but never heard back. So I winged it… reduced mileage by about 50% the first week while still doing some hard efforts, and plan to reduce even more this week with even more limited “intense” time.

I mostly stuck with the plan, but I’m not feeling as strong as I’d like to (maybe that’s natural at the end of a tough training plan?), and would have liked to get in more strength training. I say this (the weight lifting part) every time I train for something… some day I’ll get serious about muscle. Haha… probably not.

I’m happy with my general fitness, my weight is way down (8%), my power (the wattage I can put into the pedals) is only a tiny bit down (3% – natural with losing weight), and I’m pretty confident in my skills as opposed to last year (went from crashing every ride, often hard, to nothing of consequence all year). Off the bike I’ve done a lot more in regard to course recon, crew and race planning (thanks to a new Leadville podcast), nutrition dialing-in, performed a bunch of bike improvements (dropped 2.5lbs off it – they say a pound is worth five minutes at this race so in theory I got a “free” (it cost a lot of money) 12.5 minutes? I guess I had better go at least 12.5 minutes faster! 28 is the goal).

Fingers crossed it was enough! If not, I’m already in for 2019.