THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN DAYS

With travel restrictions lifting and the new season beckoning, it’s the perfect time to organise a training camp. Tom Couzens has a recipe for the perfect week away.

- Tom Couzens

You have spent many nights dreaming about it: the sound of your wheels sweeping down the descent back into town after a solid day’s training, the warmth of the sun on your bare arms and legs, restoring long-faded tan lines. Now the day has finally come for you to step onto the plane and jet off to your preseason training camp. Stop right there. Before you get lost in the romance and excitement, take a moment to consider this: how exactly are you going to make the most of those precious few sun-kissed days of intensive training?

The first question is, what’s your training camp for? For most amateur riders, if we’re being realistic, the primary purpose of a training camp is simple: to do more riding than your work/life schedule usually allows. Generally, it’s not about peaking for a specific event, but more about breaking up the winter and thereby gaining a psychological as well as a physical boost – increasing your motivation for the season ahead. “You should see your camp as a springboard into the next six-week spell of training,” says pro coach and sports scientist Jacob Tipper, “rather than imagining it as a silver bullet.

The next question is, when to go? The current period from early March to mid-April is the ideal time for a training camp, in Tipper’s view. “It makes sense to go while the weather is still wintry in the UK,” he says, speaking to me by phone from Benidorm. “By late April or May, camps become more expensive, and anyway by then the weather back home is improving. I’m in southern Spain now [in late February] and the weather is really nice and sunny.”