Most differences between cyclists I find are easy to adjust for. The most difficult challenge is the willingness of a person to take instruction and their discipline to train. At the OTC we discussed what characteristic elite athletes have in common. The answer was not physiology, nutrition, or socio- economic. The answer was training. Most of us find rigorous training to be tedious and boring. So do many elite athletes. However, they are able to train in spite of that. Perhaps the greatest ability of an elite athlete is the ability to train consistently and properly.

Since October and through the end of this month the training focus has been on building a solid fitness base. That involves many hours of steady riding at or below the fat/carb crossover point. Some people view this as slow, boring riding. They want to ride with the "rabbits" and push themselves to get a "good, hard workout."

The goal in endurance riding (or fitness riding) is to use fatty acids (FA) for as intense exercise as possible. By weight FA produces twice the energy as carbs. For the average recreational athlete the fat/carb crossover occurs at about 70% of max heart rate MHR. With training this can be pushed up to almost LT (about 85% MHR). However, this can take years.

The way to do this is to ride at the upper limits of your FA system for as long as possible. This does not necessarily mean SLOW. For the novice this may be 12 mph but for someone who has ridden for years this may be 22 mph or higher. You may think you are keeping up with the "rabbits" at 22 mph. But in reality you are sucking wind and they aren't even breaking a sweat. It takes relatively little energy to keep a bike moving along level ground so you are fooled into thinking that you are running with the big boys. Then they drop you on an incline and you think you have a climbing problem. It isn't a climbing problem - your base level of sustainable power is poor.

Lactate Threshold (LT) is the level of intensity where your body cannot remove the metabolic waste products (lactate) as fast as they are being produced. This is the burn you feel that eventually shuts down your muscles. To push our fat/carb point up we have to ride as intense as we can without crossing over into our carbohydrate energy system. To push our LT point up we don't have to worry about any crossover.

The basic way to exercise the speed (or carb) system is to ride at LT for as long as possible. If you are not used to intense exercise there are other limiting factors and it hurts to ride at LT. So we ride a little below LT. To force adaptation we bounce above LT for a while and drop back down to recover. The importance of having a good endurance base is that this recovery can be 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes.

If you rode with me on the last ride you may have notices some strange riding pattern. Sometimes I would go up an incline at 14 mph and other times I would do it at 24 mph. But I would rarely ride at 18 mph where other cyclists felt comfortable. If you are riding at a comfortable intensity then your body has nothing to adapt to. If you are training either ride slow or fast but stay out of "no man's land" in between.