Well, Freewheelers, it's wintertime. The holidays are over, it's frigid outside, and believe it or not, it's time to start preparing if you want to have a successful racing season. Its time to decide what you want to accomplish this season. What skills or techniques would you like to improve and what races do you want to ride well? Based on your goals, you need to develop a training plan that will help you reach those goals. And last of all, you need to get off the couch, put down that high fat snack and begin building your baseline endurance. A great resource to help you plan your training and racing year is Joel Friel's The Cyclists Training Bible.
In evaluating your goals for the season, you should review last year's training diary and race results. If you didn't keep a diary last year, resolve to start one now. You will be amazed at what it will tell you. By recording your daily resting heart rate you can determine when your cardiovascular system has recovered from training or racing AND when you need to take a few days off. By reviewing last year's data you can determine whether or not your body was adjusting to more intense workouts or whether you were over-training during a certain set of workouts and adjust this year's training to be more effective. By reviewing your training comments and race results you can determine where you need to focus your training to improve your skills for this year. Perhaps you notice you didn't climb as well as you wanted to last season. This year you can incorporate strength training and hill climbing to overcome this. And finally, determine what race or races you want to be ready for. You will focus on the skills necessary to do well in that particular type of race as well as focus your training plan so that you are ready to race during that time period. There is no reason to regularly ride four or five hours in a day if your goal is to do well in criteriums lasting 1½ hours or less.
Now that you have two or three goals for the upcoming racing season you need to have a training plan to help you accomplish your goals. I highly recommend The Cyclist Training Bible by Joe Friel because it focuses on evaluating where you are and helps you move realistically to where you want to be. Friel recommends self evaluation AND testing for lactate threshold and power. The self-evaluation helps you determine your strengths and weaknesses and plan your training year accordingly. Testing for lactate threshold is essential to effective training and will allow you to determine the heart rate zones in which you will get the maximum benefit for the type of workout you are doing. You can do this without any fancy equipment. You just need the help of "an assistant" and a heart rate monitor (or a Freewheeler with a Computrainer). It is well worth giving up a ride to do this baseline evaluation. Once you've established your optimal zones you can plan your training year.
While the experts have written books that will help you develop a plan, you need to adapt the plans to meet your specific needs. That's another reason I like Friel's book. It provides information to help cyclists at all training levels develop a training plan. Friel breaks the training year up into periods that start with a transition from minimal activity to a base endurance. During the base endurance period, Friel has you increase your hours on the bike and focuses on increasing the time you can ride at a time trial cadence and introduces interval training at the aerobic level. From there you move into training periods which focus on increasing intensity levels in hill climbing, sprints, and intervals. You then move into a race period where you should be at your peak and able to meet your race goals.
You need to be building your base endurance right now. These base miles will condition your body to perform and will allow you to move into more intense workouts more effectively. Don't skimp on the endurance miles. You need to be looking at the longest race you expect to ride this season and begin building your base miles to the point where you are riding that time (or a little longer) at least once a week. Early on in the winter you can intersperse jogging, cross country skiing, mountain biking, stair climbing or anything else that will improve your cardiovascular endurance with cycling. It's cold out there and indoor trainers can be a big help in getting your hours in during the winter and early spring. But by the end of this 6-9 week period you want to be getting your miles in on the bike using the heart rates you determined in your baseline testing.
While all of this may seem daunting, remember you can develop your goals and training plan while sitting on that comfortable sofa in front of a warm fireplace. Once you're done you'll be so charged up you won't be able to keep yourself from putting that plan into action. If you want to talk things over or do the baseline testing there are Freewheelers that would be glad to help you out.
Good luck, and see you on the road!
(There are a lot more out there and other Freewheelers may recommend other books to you.)