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LT Training for Lance, Why Not Nordic Skiers?
It's not clear that this is a "bike versus ski" thing. It's easy to find
bicycle training books that say "no more than two hard workout days per week" to train for endurance-distance racing. Aren't Lance Armstrong's goals rather different even from most other elite _bicycle_ racers, namely: "win the Tour de France". Does that mean that he doesn't have to worry much about winning any _sprints_? Seems to me that winning the whole TdF is completely different from winning a World Cup ski race: different course design, different team strategy, different single-day distances, etc. (Could anything like a TdF mountain stage be _legal_ under World Cup or Olympic ski rules?) I seem to remember someone claiming that modern World Cup courses (e.g. Soldier Hollow) with lots of hill climbs which are steep but not long (compared to TdF) tend to reward anaerobic "tolerance": Go hard climbing up, accept the lactic build-up, then recover on the downhill. Seems like this anaerobic "tolerance" capability would be even more important for a _mass_start_ elite ski race on a modern World Cup course. (then throw in the new world Cup race formats: sprints, 2-person relays . . . ) Seems to me there's reasons enough for some training in high-intensity, anaerobic zones : _above_ LT. Sounds like that would require lots more recovery time between workouts, even for an elite athlete -- so not 3 or 4 times a week. How that all translates down for us citizen skiers with non-elite bodies on non-World-Cup courses, who can say? Wasn't there some guy who wrote for citizen racers, and advocated as optimal training something like 3 near-LT workouts a week? Ken |
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LT Training for Lance, Why Not Nordic Skiers?
Douglas Diehl wrote:
Last fall many R.S.N. readers discussed LT training, but many issues seem unanswered. From reading training records for Lance Armstrong, it is apparent LT training (training slightly below or at the Anaerobic Threshold) is the core of his fitness program. Several workouts per week are designed to influence his LT. Apparently this from of training is very successful for him. However, elite Nordic ski racers concentrate more on long aerobic workouts with high end level 4 intervals in late summer and fall. Why is it these Scandinavian athletes are avoiding several LT workouts per week and are so successful. Of course the obvious is they have extremely high V02's, but they still look for the best training methods. Any insight from you sport physiology people would be appreciated. Doug, on the face of it you seem to be treating two different concepts as one here; i.e., "influencing one's LT," which can be done in any number of ways, including running just under one's lactate balance point -- usually 20-30 beats below LT -- for a couple of hours, with doing a number of "high end Level 4" workouts a week, which would presumably be quite taxing. How it works exactly with cycling training I don't know, but presumably Lance and others are doing a lot of long distance, getting volume, as well as intensity sessions. In any event, I've dropped in here a NY Times article from July 2002 about Lance's training. Gene ----------------------- Unyielding Training Gives Armstrong His Edge By SAMUEL ABT EVRY, France, July 28 — Lance Armstrong has a favorite comeback to people who wonder how he can climb the Alps and the Pyrenees so rapidly in the Tour de France without looking strained. "You should see my face in January or February," he said. "It's not a pretty face." At that time, Armstrong, the Tour champion, is training, not racing. At most times, in fact, he is training, not racing — Armstrong is one of the rare riders who prefers to go out on his bicycle day in, day out rather than upgrade his form in races. "I train every day," he said in an interview as he sat in his United States Postal Service team bus before a daily stage this week and discussed his year-round preparation for the race he calls his major objective. "I never miss a day of training. Never," he said with emphasis. The primary purpose, he continued, is to raise his aerobic threshold, the point where he begins building up the weary lactic acid in his muscles. Reluctant to go into the details of his training regimen and hesitant about giving away trade secrets, both Armstrong and his coach, Chris Carmichael, said that aerobic training was what set Armstrong apart from the other riders. Armstrong remained comfortably ahead today after finishing 29th in the stage from Orleans to Evry, leading Jan Ullrich, a German with Telekom, by 6 minutes 44 seconds and Joseba Beloki, a Spaniard with ONCE, by 9:05. Armstrong said he trains predominantly uphill, near Nice, where he has a home. "It's a way to escape the traffic," Armstrong said. "I do a lot of specific work, no really intense work. It's all subthreshold. "If this is your threshold," he continued, moving an envelope on the table toward him, "the purpose is to push your threshold up and I believe the only way to push it up is to train below it. If you train above it, ultimately you're going to push the threshold down," he said, moving the envelope toward him. He said that his training lasted "anywhere from two to eight hours daily" and was a mixture of work on the road and in the gym, the latter occurring mainly during the winter at home in Austin, Tex. Armstrong spends an hour a day, three times a week, in the gym, he explained. "I do a little bit of gym work, no upper body work, but lower body work, abdominal stuff, lower back stuff. "No swimming," he added, even though he was a crack swimmer as a youth and a triathlete afterward. "I'd like to swim but if I did I would immediately bulk up. I have that reaction to exercise like that." Joking with teammates in the bus and gazing out its one-way-vision windows to watch the passing crowd, Armstrong summed up his climbing skills: "You have to have a basic gift and then it's how you work with that gift, how you shape it, the work that you do, the intensity you do it in and then the motivation for the race. I'm very motivated for this race. It's everything." Carmichael, Armstrong's coach for a decade, filled in some blanks later. "We have five training components that are manipulated on a daily basis," said Carmichael, who directs Carmichael Training Systems for amateur and professional riders in the United States. "They are the train he's riding on," said Carmichael, referring to the gears used, "the intensity as measured by heart rate, pedal cadence, frequencies — how many intervals he does — and volume as measured in hours." Carmichael said the intervals can be "four 20-minute blocks at a 182 to 184 heart rate. In between the intervals, it's easy pedaling." He echoed Armstrong's reliance on aerobic threshold training. "That's when you produce energy in the presence of oxygen and you're burning two primary fuels, fat and carbohydrates," Carmichael explained. He added that during anaerobic training, activity done without supplying oxygen to the muscles, the fuel burned is glycogen, a carbohydrate the body stores. "You only have a certain amount of that in you," he said. "And the negative byproduct of anaerobically produced work is lactic acid, which slows you down and creates the burn. Work that's produced aerobically, there's no negative byproduct. "When you see Lance on the climbs in the Tour, it doesn't seem he's hurting. You know what? He really isn't. Lance is almost entirely aerobic. When he attacks, then he goes anaerobic and everybody else has already been there." So he speeds away, as he did daily in the mountains, leaving his tired rivals behind. |
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