ports psychology, expert
coaches, scientists, physiological
testing, nutrition, and the means
to quantify training effort and dose:
each of these factors has played a part in
changing the way cyclists train. But how
much has training really improved? One
thing that has always worked and which
remains just as important today is ‘putting
the miles in’.
Riding plenty of miles was the guiding
principle during the Forties, and it’s still
recommended today. Setting aside the
controversies surrounding his time as
technical director of British Cycling,
Shane Sutton knows about training,
and he has a universal piece of advice:
“Train for 16 hours a week, every week.
It doesn’t matter how you do those 16
hours, but you will get better.” Is it really
that simple?
High mileage remains a hallmark of
elite cyclists’ training. What makes it
so effective? Studies show that training
volume has a direct effect on the
physiological adaptations that underpin
fitness. These include increases in
blood volume and total number of red
blood cells, increased cardiac output,
and increases in blood capillary and
mitochondria density in muscles. Doing
lots of miles leads to lots of adaptations;
it’s a blunt instrument, but it works.
A few cyclists began experimenting
with more efficient ways of training
during the era of Fausto Coppi. He was
the top dog during the late Forties and
early Fifties, and although his overall
training advice, “Ride your bike,
ride your bike, ride your bike” was
traditional — and a tad repetitive — he
experimented with pushing harder on
parts of rides to simulate race efforts.
Cyclists were late to the game. At least
a decade earlier, distance runners had
twigged that improving performance
wasn’t solely about doing more miles.
Swedish athletes began to dominate,
thanks to using a method called fartlek,
meaning ‘speed play’ — varying the pace
and including bursts of fast running.
Then an Austrian athletics coach, Franz
Stampfl, developed interval training,
which quickly gained traction. Roger
Bannister broke the four-minute mile in
1954 having used interval training, and
likewise Czech legend Emil Zatopek,
the 1952 Olympic triple gold medallist
Chris Sidwells
Photos:Cycling WeeklyArchive, Brian Johnson(5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and the
marathon), was a devotee.
Cyclists were slow to adopt interval
training, but in a certain sense they
were already doing it. European racers
competed a lot, and racing unavoidably
involves lots of interval-intensity efforts.
In the UK, there was chaingang training,
where each rider in a group takes a turn
to set the pace at the front of a line of
riders, before dropping back, recovering
in the wheels then repeating the effort at
the front. That’s interval training too.
During the Sixties and Seventies, most
pro road racers were too busy racing to
do much training. Britain’s Barry Hoban,
a Tour de France stage and Classic
winner, says: “We only really trained
in January. We raced from February
until October, and I would do some
six-days until the end of November. I
took a month off, then trained every day
through January.”No time to train
The packed racing schedule and scarcity
of recovery days is astonishing.
“We’d go to the south of France in
February, where there’d be three races a
week, and we did group rides in between.
We did all the Classics, the one-week
stage races, then the Tour de France,
then the after-Tour criteriums, and
carried on until the Tour of Lombardy
[Il Lombardia] in October. There was no
time to train.”
We now know that the most effectivetraining involves controlling the dose
of effort in any given session, gradually
increasing subsequent doses, with
adequate recovery time in between, as
this stimulates progression. You can’t
do that in a race, as you can’t control
how it unfolds, but the pros of Hoban’s
generation had to race a lot to make
money. Even so, the best among them
understood the need for control when
building for a big target race, when they
would take time out to train.
The first rider to win five Tours de
France, Jacques Anquetil, did specific
training for big time trials. His coach
wrote schedules covering the two weeks
up to a race. They consisted of general
riding and specific time trial efforts, often
done behind a Derny pace bike, and
no racing.
‘Putting in the miles’ and regular
chaingangs persisted for quite some
time in Britain, despite interval training
being pushed in magazines. In May 1965
the French journalist and Paris-Nice
winner Jean Bobet wrote an article about
interval training for Sporting Cyclist
magazine. The session he suggested
was 12 sets of two-kilometre intervals
ridden at 40kph, with one kilometre in
between at 30kph.
Many riders, even those at the top,
didn’t have time for such a structured
approach, as they had to fit in training
around full-time jobs. They just rode
hard during whatever little training time
they had. The dentist Ian Hallam tookThere have always been cyclists who dope
to improve their performance, and not just
in racing, in training too. Like nutrition, it’s
a complicated subject, but here’s a short
summary of the ways in which doping has
affected training through the ages.
Drugs used during the Fifties and Sixties
had little direct training effect, although there
are stories of riders using amphetamines to
lose weight — not just as diet pills, but to dull
the appetite, increase effort and get them
through very long training rides while eating
as little as possible.
Things changed with anabolic steroids,
which have a profound effect on how
training is assimilated. Anabolic steroids
and certain hormones promote musclegrowth, which can increase power. They
also assist muscle repair, which helps
speed up recovery, allowing more training
volume... meaning more fitness.
But it was EPO and blood doping that
offered the biggest boost. Riders who
used either could train harder for longer,
and they recovered quicker. They ended
up with a greater capacity to increase
training volume, as well as the direct
performance boost of more red blood cells.
These substances may be the definitive
performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s
a mistake to think that they replaced the
need for extremely hard, effective training.
Instead, they helped users increase the
volume and intensity of their training.Training-enhancing drugs?
How dopers have cheated their way to fitnessCycling Weekly | December 7, 2017 | 43