Best-Laid Plans …

It’s all very well sketching out intricately detailed plans ahead of your big event, but will they really help you? Jim Cotton heads to the drawing board.

- 

New year, new you! You’re going to train harder, eat healthier and sleep better, all in pursuit of higher placings and better results in your goal events for 2019. But in the back of your mind, you know that these token resolutions won’t last beyond January. So, instead, why not look to improve your results another way: through more stringent planning and preparation for each target event? Rather than spending the season fretting about the monster mountains or breakneck pace in the peloton of your goal rides for the year, consider what could be gained from deconstructing each ride in advance; planning your tactics, pacing and nutrition?

Much was made of the intricate detail of Team Sky’s planning for Chris Froome’s Giro d’Italia-winning stage 19 ride, in which he cracked then-leader Simon Yates and distanced his closest remaining rival by 40 seconds. Documents obtained by the BBC revealed the master-plan devised to launch Froome into the pink jersey, a strategy that mapped out his pacing and nutrition almost to the kilometre. This kind of information is usually kept secret by Team Sky, but after all the pressure put on them following Froome’s performance that day, amid the salbutamol case still ongoing at the time, they released it to show how much they put into such a ride, and how breaking it down makes the ride look less daunting.

The training

Before you even go near the nitty-gritty of the detailed planning for the ride, you need to schedule your training correctly, to be as specific as possible to the demands of the route. Focus your preparation on the key elements of your fitness that will be required on the big day, be it short, punchy intervals for road racing, long, steady efforts for mountain climbing, or threshold work for time trials.