Hi All,
My target race is an XC climb of aprox 20min duration. I chose Focus: GC Specialist = 8mins, any feedback if this is appropriate ?
Thanks a lot
Any suggestions?
Sounds reasonable, but maybe ride the hill at max speed now and see how Xert rates it? You are probably not riding with a constant power.
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This is a good idea, unfortunately the course is full of snow now and won’t be rideable up until 2 or maybe 3 weeks before the race.
Hey - exciting - a race to look forward to.
So it’s a straight up short race of 20 minutes with no before or after …
For that - I’d want a plan that focussed on the actual duration - and I’d expect that plan to include a fair amount of intensity (the sports scientists that put these things together obvs will have the intensity mix nailed).
So during a plan for that kind of event, you’re likely working both your maximal aerobic capacity (eg 5 minute type efforts), which will bring your ceiling up hopefully, as well as training your ‘20 minute’ systems.
Good luck with the race.
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I need some help here 
. It seems that with Xert I have 3 options:
- Keep current program with GC focus.
- Use a different focus
- Use the new AI feature.
The climb itself is of course a segment, and I could use the ‘segment hunter’….
I’d like some guidance here @xertedbrain
This is a pic of last year’s race. I started too hard and faded badly
What was the Focus & Specificity rating of this race last year? And is the entire race just this one particular segment?
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Yes!
If I select just the race segment of the ride (I rode from and to home), I get:
Puncheur
Mixed
However, as I said before I paced this race very poorly. So perhaps, ideal pacing will have different focus & specificity rating.
The race is basically an all out 20 minute effort that has some 5MMP 30sec efforts here and there and a very hard 40 second sprint at the end.
You could try reverse engineering it if you’re worried last years race isn’t quite right for the pacing you want.
Basically your pacing strategies are:
-
constant effort so that just as you cross the finish line you run out of MPA with a constant draw down (assuming no latent breakthroughs etc etc). This is good if it’s fairly constant gradient so power is good the whole time
-
Surge then recover for sprint. Good if there are pinches or points where you need to accelerate to get position on the track. Of course there’s a balance of is it hard surges so you want to recover for the sprint or small surges that mean maybe enough MPA is left for the sprint without recovery.
After deciding what you think pacing would be from your race last year, go in and create a workout that fits that profile with your MPA breaking through as you sprint to the finish. You’ll probably need to play around a bit to think whether drawing MPA down fully or not at a point is realistic. But it’s as objective as any other way to work this out
After you’ve made it Check what focus and specificity it says that workout is, and use that.
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This is great. Thanks!