Two-time Olympian and professional mountain-bike racer Carl Swenson is a part-time Winter Park resident.
With my final Olympics this coming winter, I’m in a different environment. Most of my summer will be dedicated to training for skiing, spending a month in Norway and a month on the snow in New Zealand. I start regular roller-ski training in a week, and the ski season starts, hopefully, by Nov. 1.
Typically at this time of year, I would be riding a ton, training specifically for mountain-bike racing. I have found the best preparation at this point in the season always has been doing a lot of road miles, and I usually try to compete in the Tour of the Gila that just finished May 1 in New Mexico. I think road-stage racing is a great way to bring yourself into race shape in a hurry.
It’s more or less a series of intervals, between the climbs and the breakaways in the flats, with moments when you let up and recover. It’s a great way to get in a whole week’s worth of training.
Plus, racing is exciting. There’s no way you can ever push yourself as hard as a race does. Every top mountain biker I know does quite a bit of road racing, too.
One of the keys to both styles of racing is planning recovery time. Generally, a big mistake athletes make is subjecting themselves to too much stress without enough recovery. After a road race like the Tour of the Gila, I try to give myself an easy week with a lower volume of miles and only a couple of intensity workouts on my mountain bike. An intensity workout is anything that gets your heart rate up to race pace, and I’ll generally do about two workouts with four to six intervals of two to five minutes in length at intensity. But it’s different for different people.
The best way to figure out what works for you is to keep a training log for years and years so you have a good idea of how your body reacts to different kinds of stress and recovery periods.
If you don’t allow your body to recover, you won’t get that strength benefit. You just fall into a downward spiral. That spring break-in is important, and you need to achieve a certain level of fitness for sure, but if you really want to set performance goals, you have to break up the training a little more. Eventually you will see your body react even better to the hard sessions afterward.
