Hang on in your first single-lap road race: These races can be brutally hard for beginning racers. Knowing the course is even more important in single-lap races, Holcomb says: Avoid missing poorly marked turns by loading the route into your cycling GPS computer or by taping a cue sheet to your handlebars.
Focus on skills in your first criterium : Criteriums are the shortest road races, and also one of the most technical: They involve corner after corner of tight turns and often end in sprint finishes. You still want to know the course not all time trials are flat and straight and prepare for corners, but you will prepare a bit differently.
Learn how to get as aero as possible for the race itself. Eat early and eat often! Stage races are races of attrition and can combine any of the other race styles—single-lap, circuit, crit, time trial, etc. Learn more about club riding. Ride a time trial. Mass-start races also put a premium on the ability to repeatedly go hard for short periods, recover, then go again.
Learn about time trial workouts. Compete in training races. Some clubs have a weekly race. A common cross-country mountain bike course includes significant elevation gain and tricky descents. Bike-handling skills, a keen sense of awareness and an element of bravery are all vital characteristics of a successful cross-country mountain bike racer. Similar to a criterium in road cycling, short track cross-county was introduced as a spectator-friendly discipline. It is an endurance-oriented event that features off-road racing on a short circuit.
Traversing rough and often steep terrain, a short track cross-country race typically only lasts 20 minutes as competitors start and finish fast. Often times, cross country and short track bikes do not feature rear suspension in an attempt to save weight, though it may be a worthy compromise on some courses. Ultra-endurance racing also comes in the form of hour and hour competitions in which solo competitors and relay teams attempt to cover the most distance over a given amount of time.
Competitors ride the lift to the top and descend the face of a mountain in an individual race against the clock, only timed on the way down. The rider with the fastest time is declared the winner. Riders compete on bikes that have full suspension systems which allow them to experience a smooth ride as they descend down rocky trails, jumps and drop-offs.
Typically speaking, a mountain biker specializes in either endurance or gravity-oriented events, but not both. A downhill rider will often cross over into four-cross and dual slalom competitions. The athletes are also easily identifiable at events as the ones with full-face helmets, body armor, and pads. Similar to the slalom events in downhill ski racing, competitors must weave themselves in and out of gates while descending the face of a hill.
A course will typically have two identical runs — red and blue — with the same features, including berms, rollers, and doubles. After the first heat, riders switch runs and descend the hill a second time.
After each rider competes on the red and blue course, his or her times are added together and the rider with the lowest cumulative time advances to the next round, while the other is eliminated. Also referred to as mountain cross, four-cross replaced dual slalom on the international circuit in In the four-cross event, gravity riders are seeded into four-person brackets following an individual seeding run. Once seeded into their respective brackets, riders descend a technical, downhill course with tight turns, berms and jumps.
Riders start four-wide and descend the course simultaneously after the start gate drops. From there, the idea is simple: the top two riders in each heat advance to the next round while the others are eliminated from contention. Short for super downhill, this discipline is a hybrid of cross-country and downhill racing. Competitors start one at a time at the top of a mountain and traverse a long, winding, downhill course that also requires riders to climb sections to access additional descents.
Although the course profile is downhill in nature, many endurance athletes regularly contest the super downhill. Super D differs from cross-country in the sense that there is no sustained climbing involved and descending skills are most important. The course is built for consistent speed and to compliment an all-around rider. The newest form of mountain biking, enduro is like multiple Super D runs, linking technical downhill trails with flat and uphill sections typically found at a cross-country race.
Races have more than one stage, and oftentimes riders must climb fireroads or trails to reach later stages. In enduro events, only the downhill sections are timed. A rider's stage times added together to create an overall time. Competitors typically choose bikes that allow for the bike-handling capabilities required of a downhill racer, but also don't prohibit sustained climbing.
Half entertainment, half sport, observed trials feature riders who negotiate an obstacle course on their bike. The goal is to traverse the course on your bike without letting your feet touch the ground. The extreme case study that comes to mind is one local time triallist who would ride a club 10 on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - and then an open race at the weekend.
Sunday was the club run, so all his weekly training was taken care of! Friday was his only concession to rest and recovery. This is extreme, but it's not uncommon for cyclists to be racing three or four times a week in the summer.
There's nothing wrong with racing this amount in itself, indeed this is at the very heart of some people's enjoyment of the sport. However, if the reason for participating in the sport is for the cyclist to see improvements in performance, racing at this frequency isn't going to cut it. After all, racing is not training - it's very different. I'd like to explain why and also to help cyclists think about how to nudge up their race performance using a carefully designed progression of training stress.
With no strain or stress, the body will stay where it is. If demands go up, with a short period of recovery, the body will rebuild to be stronger in order to prepare itself for another bout of stress.
Through repeated cycles of stress and recovery the training plan the body and its systems will break down because of the training session and re-build during periods of recovery to a new higher level training adaptation. A coach can plan the rate of progression of this training stress - the amount of stress placed on the cyclist, and how quickly that amount of training can be ramped up week on week.
The variables the coach must manipulate to place the ideal amount of stress on the athlete are the so-called principles of training: specificity, overload, recovery, progression and reversibility. As a coach, it's my responsibility to tie my athletes down to a race season plan.
However, even when I think we have a finalised plan, I often have to deal with a few challenging curve balls when an athlete informs me of a few last minute race entries. Why do I cringe when I find myself in this situation? Surely, if the aim is to get fit, racing can only help get you into shape?
To some extent, this is true. Undoubtedly, there are some benefits that racing brings to race form. I doubt racing achieves this, but it does help you become more race pace-efficient. Being more efficient means using less oxygen per watt, so for the same absolute fitness oxygen uptake you can push more watts and go faster.
Indeed, in a research study we performed in a group of French pro cyclists, we observed improved performance that was directly related to the time spent racing, all explained by increased levels of efficiency.
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