 Today, I'm going to be taking you back through my 2022 season. I'll be talking about what I did right, but more importantly, I'll be talking about what I didn't do right and taking all of that into account. I'll discuss the changes I plan on making to my training in 2023. Unlike most of my videos, this one won't be super science heavy and I'll explain why. Unfortunately, we haven't tested every single endurance sports related question and as coaches, we have to make educated guesses where these gaps in our knowledge lie. Most of the time these educated guesses are based on experience and I'm no different. While I rely on science to give me a base understanding of what proper training should look like, I'm constantly shifting my opinion on the finer details of what the perfect training plan entails based on my own experience. I don't think I've ever come into a new year without at least a few changes in mind that I plan on implementing and that's what I'll be talking about today. This isn't necessarily advice. It's more so just a glimpse into my thought process when I'm evaluating these changes I need to make to my training and hopefully this can give you an idea of how you can do the same. Dude, you had me at not a lot of science. I might actually make it through this video. Who am I kidding? Let's start first by taking a look back at 2022. How did the season go and what are my thoughts on it? If you're a regular viewer of this channel, then you know that my main goal of 2022 was the lifetime Grand Prix which has quickly become the pinnacle of off-road racing in the US. In the lifetime GP, I ended up in 16th place out of the 30 men that were selected to compete and 20 men that were actually able to finish the whole series. I don't usually get too worked up about a mid-pack finish but considering the insane level of competition in this series, including former World Tour pros, national champions, world champions, world record holders and so on. I'm actually pretty happy with how it went. That being said, the goal is always improvement and I've gotten into the lifetime Grand Prix again for 2023. And if anything, the competition is even more stacked than last year. So I'd like to see if I can improve on last year's result, but it is not going to be easy. So let's go back a bit and talk about my 2022 preparation. The first thing I want to address is training volume. Well, I didn't mention it explicitly in my 2022 training video. Sometime early in the year, I decided to decrease my training volume. This may seem like an odd decision coming from a guy who does 100 to 200 mile races, but I'll explain my thinking at the time. I often find that I hit a mid-season slump around June or July. I usually take a break during this time and that helps but then towards the end of the season, I start experiencing the same thing. Some of this is certainly that I'm coming off of a peak, but the fact that it's usually accompanied by chronic fatigue made me think that there's a little bit of overtraining going on here. Perhaps if I decrease my training volume, I could avoid this overtraining and avoid these dips in performance that I seem to get on top of that a lower training volume would mean that my high intensity workouts could be done at an even higher quality because I wasn't so tired from riding so much and potentially this could lead to even greater fitness. So how much did I decrease my training volume? Well, in 2022, I logged 743 hours of training and for the previous three years before that my yearly volume had typically been in the mid 800s. This is a good snapshot, but obviously it doesn't tell the whole picture. So I'm going to be taking a look at training peaks performance manager chart, which some of you will be familiar with and some of you won't, but essentially what you need to know is that training peaks takes your training volume and intensity to come up with your chronic training load, which they call fitness. I have a few issues with this that I won't get into here and I generally take these numbers with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, it's still a great tool and can demonstrate what I'm talking about. This graph may look a bit confusing, but all you have to pay attention to is the shaded blue line in the background. That's my chronic training load. This shows my CTL from the past year and as you can see it goes up during the base season and then when the race season hits, it starts to taper off. The reason for this tapering off is because I'm constantly either recovering from a race. I just did or tapering for a race that I have coming up and so out of necessity training volume tends to decrease during this period. Regardless at the end of my base season, I was hovering at a CTL of around a hundred again for a lot of people that number will mean absolutely nothing, but when we compare it to the previous year, you'll get an idea of how much less I was training. As you can see, the 2021 mountain of training load, if you will, was quite a bit higher than in 2022 and we've got some deeper valleys in 2022 from when I got COVID. By the end of my base season in 2021, I was over 130 for my CTL, which is quite a bit more. This was achieved by doing multiple 30 plus hour weeks during the winter and early spring in 2022. However, I didn't do any 30 hour weeks. My big weeks during this time period were in the mid 20 hour range. So how did the strategy work out for me? Well, pretty decently actually until it didn't. I'll explain for some of my early season goals like sea otter and unbound, I actually performed very well when looking at the numbers. For example, at unbound, I had the highest normalized power, average power and the fastest finishing time that I've ever had at this race. Now, of course, there are other factors that contributed to that, but the point is that dropping my training volume didn't seem to hinder me even in a race that was 10 hours long. That being said, I think where this lower training volume did fail me was later on in the season. First of all, lowering my training volume did not stop me from experiencing a mid season slump. That's still happened, but I don't think that it's volume related and I'll get into what I think the cause is in a minute. Secondly, while my endurance seemed fine in the first half of the season, in the second half of the season, it really started to slip and I'll go back to the performance manager chart to explain why I think that is. As I said, CTL tends to drop throughout the season. However, in 2021, even at the end of the season, I was still holding a CTL of around 100 contrast that with 2022 and by the end of the season, my CTL had dropped to the low 80s and it seems to me that at this point, my endurance starts to take a hit. At the Leadville 100 and BWR Michigan race, I experienced a large drop in power in the last two hours of the race that cost me a handful of places. And it's not like I wasn't fit during this time, at least according to my power numbers in training. In fact, I hit a 20 minute power PR in August with 391 watts or 5.7 watts per kilo. Huh, not bad, not bad. I mean, mine is 401, but you know, who's counting? My numbers were looking good for shorter duration efforts, but then get to the five hour mark and I was in trouble. I think this lack of late season endurance is where the lower volume failed me. Nah, dude, what failed you is definitely your lack of testosterone. I think I watched this YouTube video about it or something. For these reasons, my plan for 2023 is to return back to the high training volume that I've done in years past. And if my body is able to recover from it, I may even try to push that volume a little bit higher. We'll just have to see. I may also experiment with different ways to organize a training week, such as the 5-2 approach used by Neil's Vanderpole, where you train for five days in a row, followed by two rest days as opposed to spreading rest days evenly throughout the week. There isn't a lot of research on this strategy other than some very promising research on block periodization, but that isn't quite the same thing. However, I think it might be worth experimenting with and if it isn't working, I can always scrap it. All right. Now I want to talk about the biggest mistake I made in 2022 and that is overracing. There are simply so many gravel races on the US calendar at this point and it can be really hard to say no. And in the first half of the season in 2022, I made the mistake of simply not saying no enough. Starting in April, I had a local gravel race. A week later was sea otter. Two weeks later was the Cojada 100. A week after that was BWR San Diego. A week after that was another local gravel race. And finally, a week after that was gravel locos. That's six races in seven weekends and these are not short races that we're talking about. For example, Cojada and gravel locos were seven-hour days. Not too surprisingly, I was too fatigued to do really any quality training in between these races. It was really just recovery rides and light zone two rides. As a result, my fitness dropped and I spent the majority of the three weeks in between gravel locos and unbound simply recovering when I should have been putting in some big race specific days on the bike. And then I did unbound and BWR Asheville on back-to-back weekends. Unbound was a 10-hour day and BWR was a seven-hour day. And I can honestly say that in all my years of bike racing, I have never felt so fatigued from a race than when I woke up the next morning after BWR. I was tired leading into the race. I was tired during the race and the next day I could barely get up off the couch the entire day and to top it all off, that night I had a wedding to go to where I caught COVID. Thanks Carson and Kate. Sounds like a bunch of excuses, bro. I need to be writing these down. Having just experienced this, I did not make the same mistake in the second half of the season and going into 2023, I plan to be a lot more selective with the races I put on my calendar. I see this as a quality over quantity approach. Some racers race a ton and hope that some of those results end up being good results. But increasingly I find myself more in the quality camp where I'd prefer to do fewer races and have those races go very well, especially considering the length of the races that I'm doing. Of course, there are superhumans among us that can achieve both quantity and quality, but those are few and far between. Finally, I want to talk about strength training and sprinting. Gravel racing is getting so competitive that I would say the majority of gravel races are coming down to some sort of sprint finish, whether that's from a group of just two or three riders to a larger group of 10 or more. Well, this is still not the same as sprinting from a whole peloton, which happens so frequently in road races. It's become clear to me that I need to work on my sprint. I had multiple races last year that came down to a sprint finish and I don't recall winning any of them. Now, I also wasn't the slowest sprinter in a lot of these finishes either, but if I'm coming to the line with say five riders, then I could probably expect to get second or third and I'd like to fix that if I can. I have to be a bit careful with this because these are still endurance races that I'm training for and you can't sprint for the finish if you get dropped an hour before you even get there. So it'll still be endurance. That's the focus of my training. I don't want to raise my VLA max too much. That being said, I will be including more sprinting in my training on the bike. I'll often incorporate sprints at the end of an interval session to mimic sprinting at the end of a race. But I think that also sprinting on fresh legs could be beneficial because they can be done at higher quality. I'm also going to try to maintain my gym work into the season for longer gym work helps with all aspects of cycling, including endurance, which I've gone over multiple times on this channel, but it's especially helpful for peak power output. Last year, I stopped going to the gym quite early in mid April and this was simply because I was racing too much. But again, I plan on not making that same mistake this year. So hopefully it'll be easier to maintain my gym work longer into the season, even if it's just once a week. I'll also likely increase the amount of explosive movements I'm doing and decrease the weight. This should leave my muscles less achy so I can focus on high quality workouts on the bike and the faster lifting rate should theoretically be more specific to the fast pedaling rate that you adopt when you're sprinting. And of course, a big part of sprinting is positioning. So I'll likely throw in some group rides and weekday night training crits so that I can work on that as well. Those are my ideas for 2023. Again, less science in this video and more educated guesswork, but that is part of what coaches have to do and who better to test on than myself. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, be sure to leave a like, subscribe and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.