 It's looking like 2022 will be a big step up for me as far as racing goes. I have more high priority races on the calendar than I've ever had. The incentives to do well are greater than they've ever been for me. And the season is going to go longer than I'm used to. So given all of that, as somebody who's self-coached, how do I plan to tackle the training for this upcoming year? If you're a regular viewer of this channel, then you know that I usually cover training related topics. However, I rarely discuss my own training, but in this video, I'm going to take you through how I plan out my training season. And hopefully this can give you a better idea of how to plan out your own training season. Or maybe I'm just handing over my playbook to all of my rivals. The first place to start when planning out your season is to decide what your goals are. And for me, that's racing. And this year, I've been fortunate enough to be selected for the Lifetime Grand Prix. If you aren't familiar with what the Lifetime Grand Prix is, it's a brand new six-ray series here in the US. Three of the races are gravel races, and three of the races are endurance mountain bike races. These races include the Seattle Classic Marathon mountain bike race, the Unbound 200, Crusher in the Tusher, the Leadville 100, Czechomegon and the Big Sugar 100 mile gravel race. As you may have noticed, these races are all pretty different. I think that's the point. And they may require slightly different preparation. However, they are all long distance off-road events. So training for one shouldn't be drastically different from training for the others. Some of them are at altitude, which will require acclimation. But I'll get into that in a minute. More daunting than that, though, is the field of riders that I'm up against. This series requires that you apply to get in, and they're very selective about who they choose. Only 30 women and 30 men were selected. And as you can imagine, with a $250,000 prize per split across the top 10 men and women, this series attracted some of the best talent in the U.S. From gravel, mountain biking, road and even track, including current and former World Tour pros, national champions, Olympians and world champions. Wait, what? I thought this was just a series for want to be social media influencers. I mean, you got in, so I just assumed. Obviously, I was very excited to get selected. But looking at the list of riders, I do wonder what I've gotten myself into. Nevertheless, I will throw everything I've got at this series this year from training to nutrition to equipment, et cetera. Doing as well as I can in this series is my main goal for 2022. But there are other races on the calendar like the Belgian Waffle Ride quadruple crown series and other gravel and mountain bike races spread out throughout the year, like Mid-South or gravel Locos or Shenandoah 100 and so on. All right, now that I have an idea of the goal, I need to decide when to peak. Peaking six different times for six different races across six months is simply not feasible and is the kind of move that would end up blowing up in my face. Usually I pick two times in the year that I want to be in peak shape. But with the way this season is laid out, I'm going to go for three, which is still a lot and I do struggle with late season fitness. And that last peak is usually just me grasping at straws, trying to maintain the fitness that I've built up over the course of the year. But I do have a plan that hopefully will remedy this. So with this said, I need to pick three races in the series that suit me well and have good spacing between them so that I have enough time to build back up again. In general, the longer the race, the better I perform relative to other people. And it just so happens that the three longest races in this series, Unbound, Leadville and Big Sugar are spaced nicely on the calendar with Unbound at the beginning of June, Leadville in mid-August and Big Sugar at the end of October. These races also have other races scheduled around the same time that I would like to do well at so I can make the most of the peak. For example, Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina is a week after Unbound and Steamboat Gravel and Belgian Waffle Ride Kansas are the day after Leadville and Big Sugar respectively and within reasonable driving distance. Now, of course, I will go to the other three races and try to do as well as I can in them, but I just won't peak for them. This series takes your five best results and with races like this, at least one of them is probably going to be a throw away with mechanicals so consistency will be key. All right, I've got the races on the calendar and I've decided which ones I want to prioritize. Now, how do I plan my training? After my last race of 2021, I took a two week break and didn't ride my bike at all. And in fact, I did very little exercise. If you're a serious athlete, then this can feel very weird, but it's crucial to let your body recover from the long season you've had. And there is even research to show that certain blood values in pro cyclists will drop throughout the course of a season. And only in the off season when they take a break, do they finally give these blood values a chance to return to normal. Certain hormones could potentially act the same way. After this rest period, I started weightlifting again. And for about a two month period, this was the main focus of my training. And if you want to learn more about why this is so important, then check out my recent weightlifting for cyclists video that I've linked down in the description. I was still riding during this time, but the intensity and volume was relatively low. And for me, that means around seven to 12 hours per week. Most of that done at a comfortable endurance pace with a little bit of intensity sprinkled in for maintenance. The length of this period will really depend on when you want that first peak to be. And for me, that's the unbound 200 at the beginning of June. You then work back five or six months to decide when you want to start your base season. For me, working back five months puts the start of my base season on January 17th. I sometimes get asked the question, well, why not start sooner? If you start your base season earlier, won't you be in even better shape by the time you get to the summer? In my experience, this is rarely the case. To be honest, if I had to choose between starting too early and too late, I'd actually choose late because it's extremely easy to feel burnt out if you've been training for months and months on end by the time you get to your race season and have your fitness hit a plateau well before you need a peak. And this is especially true if you continued training hard through the winter and never took a break. I feel personally attacked. My base season will last three months. And at the end of my last month of base training will be my first lifetime GP race, the Seattle Classic on April 7th. If you're thinking start on January 17th and on April 7th, that's not three months. Well, you're right. And that's because we're planning training in four week blocks, which is 28 days, not a full month. Pro tip when planning out your training, actually bust out the calendar and count the weeks. Don't just go however many months back from your peak race. Back to the schedule, though. Again, I won't be in peak shape for sea otter, but with three months of base training in my legs, I should be able to hold my own over this base period. The primary focus is going to be increasing training volume as a means of increasing the training load and creating progressive overload. Doing this can serve as preconditioning for the higher intensity work to come. What this means is that I'll probably start the base season around 20 hours per week, and this will gradually increase towards the end of the base season. There will probably be some weeks that are pushing 30 hours. What I found is that trying to do more than this is usually too much for my body to handle. Most of the riding during this time is going to be in endurance zone. You may have heard me talk about the polarized and pyramidal model of training, both of which have strong evidence to back them up and require the vast majority of riding to be done at a relatively low intensity. During the base season and throughout the whole season in general, actually, given the nature of the races that I'm doing, I'll be following more of a pyramidal model as opposed to a polarized one. With this model, 75 to 80 percent of riding is done at low intensity, with 15 to 20 percent done at moderate intensity and the rest at high intensity. The reason for sticking more to this model is because it has more time at this middle intensity as opposed to polarized, which has you either riding at low intensity or high intensity, hence the name polarized. The races that I'm doing are long and will have a lot of time riding at this middle intensity, so this model will be more race specific. At the start of the base season, I'll likely only be doing intensity sessions every week to every other week. But as the base season progresses, the frequency will increase and these sessions will become more taxing as I spend more time at a given zone during these sessions. For example, if I start off doing three by 10 minute efforts at FTP at the beginning of base, I may bump that up to four by 10 minute and then four by 12 minute and then four by 15 so that I'm increasing the training load during this time to compensate a bit for this increasing training load on the bike. I'll start decreasing my training load in the gym first by decreasing the number of sets I do, then by decreasing the weight. And then eventually I'll start only going to the gym once a week instead of twice a week. Once the base season is over, then we have a two month build period before onbound. Typically over the build period, volume will go down and intensity will increase as racing approaches. But probably more important than that is that specificity of training needs to increase so training should become more specific to your event. Unbound is an extremely long race, obviously. So the ability to motor all day at tempo or high endurance pace is going to be key for this reason. During the build period, although the intensity will increase, it'll remain mostly pyramidal and the high volume will remain as well. After all, this is a high volume event. And believe me, when you get eight hours into unbound, you aren't thinking, wow, I really wish I spent less hours on the bike to get ready for this thing. There will be race specific workouts during this period, for example, five to seven hour days on the bike with tempo or threshold efforts thrown in at the beginning and end of the ride to simulate what will likely need to be done on race day. In the last month leading into the event, though, I will include some of your standard hit sessions like 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off and VO2 max intervals, because these intervals are particularly effective at raising FTP. And some research suggests that the combination of hit training with more specific training may be the optimal strategy. That being said, even in the build period, the vast majority of the riding that I'm doing will be done at a relatively low intensity at endurance zone or less. And this actually becomes even more important in the build period because you want to be as well recovered as possible for your high intensity sessions and doing your low intensity sessions harder will only detract from that. And in fact, doing this has been shown to lead to slower overall race times, even in ultra endurance disciplines. Lifting during the build period will likely have to be cut out on my plan completely due to the high volume of very demanding races that will require careful attention to recovery. In the final week before Unbound, I'll do a taper where I dramatically decrease volume but maintain intensity. I have a video explaining exactly how to do this linked in the description as well. After Unbound, it'll be critical that I take a break. To many, this may seem counterintuitive. You're in great shape. Why would you just throw that away by not riding? What will inevitably happen is that you'll hit a plateau and your fitness may even start to drop if you try to hold on to your fitness. This is what I alluded to earlier when I talked about my fitness fizzling out at the end of the season. I'm actually going to try to take two breaks this year instead of just one. The first will come after Unbound and then I'll do another two month build for Leadville. And then after Leadville, I'll take another break and do one last two month build for Big Sugar. These rest periods will likely be five to seven days of no riding whatsoever. The build phase for all three of these races will probably look pretty similar, although there will be a bit more high intensity for Big Sugar, since it will be a shorter race at least by time to complete it. And there will probably be more volume leading into Unbound since it is the longest race of the season. Chronic fatigue may catch up to me towards the end of the season and I might have to reduce my volume, but I'll try to mitigate that. The one major difference with the Leadville build is that Leadville is a high altitude race. The town is at 10,000 feet or 3,000 meters and it goes up from there. So I'll likely be spending three or more weeks in Colorado to acclimate. And you guessed it, I have a whole video on altitude acclimation if you want to learn more about that. Now, this is the plan, but plans are subject to change and rarely is my plan on day one followed to a T. In fact, I don't think that's ever happened. I could get sick or injured or feel like I'm overtraining and need to back it down or a whole list of other scenarios. And it's important to know that that's OK. Your plan doesn't need to be followed perfectly and it will probably be to your detriment if it is make room for shifts in your plan and adjust accordingly. Well, that's a relief. I start changing my training plan every time I get a new email notification from Strava. Thanks for watching. I do plan to make more videos covering my racing this year. So if you want to follow along, be sure to subscribe. And if you're on Instagram, that's probably the best place to stay up to date. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.