Clifton CC

I am happy to bow to the experience of older and wiser heads on this. I will be off my bike for a few weeks now unfortunately.

Just read your report on Seacroft - sorry to hear what happened; really bad luck, sounds like you were doing all the right things. Hope the shoulder mends quickly and you're able to get your bike sorted and back on the road soon.

Reuben, thanks for your enthusiasm and hope you mend quickly.

I'm now a bit confused - other than riding 100k's as often as possible, what should 4th Cats be doing to get ready for Tockwith? I'm hoping to do the Thursday Cycleworks ride, on top of Saturday 9am and Monday or Wednesday (whatever I manage).

I'm far from expecting to get results at Tockwith - staying with the bunch will be plenty enough, though making a dig at the front to get other clubs working might be a good goal for the series. I doubt I'll even manage to be around for the lead-outs, though without practice, I doubt I'd be useful. I'm looking much more towards the NYRRL to get a go at picking up points.

"...what should 4th Cats be doing to get ready for Tockwith?"

I'm not a coach, but here's some suggestions:-

- You need to be able to maintain a fast pace (20-25mph+) in a group for something like an hour - so do chaingangs
- You need to be comfortable going fast and cornering with lots of other riders around you - chaingangs and Saturday training rides
- You need to be able to repeatedly sprint out of corners - practice sprinting, probably repeatedly!

All of the above assumes you've spent the winter doing a mixture of base training for endurance and slightly more intense stuff to shunt your aerobic threshold gently up to wherever you can get it to. Beyond that, best way to get good at doing crits is do crits!

I liked Phi's suggestion for cornering training which is just to turn up early at Tockwith and practice the actual corners. In reality there is only one that is hard (i.e. quite tight/fast) but it is the most important one before start/finish sprint so it is worth practising!

Maybe Phil can post his mysterious 20% sprinting improvement tips?? Personally I would like to improve my sprinting by training against someone else (hence my proposed sessions) but this won't be an option for me for a few weeks.

Only thing I would add is to treat the other riders with supreme caution! I think that I was probably too relaxed about other riders on Sunday because was used to the smooth and steady style of Clifton training rides over winter and I didn't expect someone to move backwards and across me so quickly. Tough balance this because you don't want to be so nervous that you are always over-braking and therefore wasting energy but you definitely don't want to come off - it hurts and is expensive!

The mysterious 20% sprinting improvement regime comes from an article in the LVRC mag a few winters ago. It's basically an eight-week programme of two one-hour sessions per week. In the first week the hour is spent doing 15sec sprint / 15sec recovery for the duration. Week 2 you do 15sec sprint / 30sec recovery, and the recovery then increases by each week to 45sec, 1min15sec, 1min45sec etc until by week eight you're doing 12 sprints in an hour with full recovery inbetween. The trick is managing the intensity - in the early weeks you're just spinning up the pedals at low power, but you gradually up the oomph each week so by the time you're at week eight you're giving each one the most effort you can give over the twelve repeats.

The theory is that leg speed is trainable whereas proportion of fast-twitch muscle isn't, so getting cadence and hence leg speed up is the way to go. The article also suggests doing leg strength work (possibly in the gym) and also getting experience of rubbing shoulders in bunch sprints. Being self-employed and having got into my fifties without breaking any major bones I'm still nervous in crowded sprints, but in any road or circuit race the pace varies a lot (especially in and out of corners) and giving yourself a bit more top-end is no bad thing.

As Darren says - no guarantees etc - but I certainly recommend giving it (or something like it) a go.

I know many see the Tour on TV now, go out buy a bike, and want to race asap. I think a better approach would be to start with the social rides where you can't crash because you've got a braking distance of about 15 feet. Progress to the clubruns where it's good tight riding in 2's, a few old hands who've been there and done it can pass on the knowledge. By now you're starting to get a good base in the legs. Training rides, Chaingangs, sprint drills, hill repeats etc etc.


If you're born with a high percentage of those fast twitch muscle fibres, then think about where you're going to put all those trophies, if not Phil's suggestions make perfect sense to me.

At Tockwith and crits in general it's also important to get the gearing right, you need to be on top of it as soon as you get out of the corner, it's no good just about grinding it round by the time you're into the next one.

Yorkshire day at the races dates are up, 14th of April and the 28th of April. Fourth cat only's should be a good warm up...I'm there

I would be interested in competing with you all too, already got my bc racing licence as my main priority this year is the xc nps but I don't think it has any serious date clashes with the tockwidth series so I'm in

I've entered the 4th cat for next week, is anyone else planning to do the same?