Now that you have worked diligently in the weight room and acquired quadriceps to rival Mario Cipollini's, the time has come to turn that strength and power into performance on the bicycle. There are a number of workouts specifically designed to improve performance in time trialing and attacking. Each of these will rely on the strength and power you gained in the weight room during the off-season.

Time trials are strength-intensive, requiring the ability to turn a large gear repeatedly over a long period of time. Sustaining a break, bridging up to a breakaway, catching back up to the group after getting dropped and motoring up a long, gradual grade demand the ability to time trial. The effort is gradual and constant as the rider strives to walk the knife-edge between blowing up and taking it too easy.

Attacks are hard accelerations followed by several minutes of less-intense but still anaerobic effort. Initiating a break and hanging in when the group jumps to bring back an attack demand skills developed while training your attack. Power is required to accelerate quickly and strength is necessary to maintain the effort until the chase fails or the break is shutdown. Attack workouts will also improve your ability to hammer up steep hills, another purely anaerobic activity.

Strength and Power Training
If hills don't loom somewhere along the route then wind sweeping over the flatlands is probably sufficient to power Chicago.

Since your main goal is improving your century pace, you may consider all strength work other than time trial development to be worthless. For a flat century on a calm day, you would be right. However, as most of you already know, such perfect conditions never exist. If hills don't loom somewhere along the route then wind sweeping over the flatlands is probably sufficient to power Chicago. Also, from a mental standpoint, developing power and anaerobic fitness gives a greater sense of confidence as well as a stronger feeling of well-being. Since every cyclist I have ever met agrees that cycling is at least as demanding mentally as it is physically, any mental edge you can gain will reap huge rewards.

Before getting to the workouts, I want to emphasize the importance of adding strength workouts to your training regimen. The key to escaping the trap of mediocrity as a cyclist is to vary workouts. Never fall into the trap of getting on the bicycle every day with no set plan other than adding miles to your base. In the early season, it is good to collect about 1000 base miles before beginning intense workouts, particularly if you stopped riding during the winter or significantly reduced your training intensity. However, once your mileage base is established, spending every day acquiring more base miles is a waste of valuable training time.

I need to reiterate what was said in my very first column. Training advice given here does not typically apply to the ultracyclists who participate in 24-hour or multi-day races. These riders rely much more heavily on aerobic training than shorter distance riders. Going anaerobic during ultra-events could be detrimental, whereas professional racers competing in a 100-mile road race must frequently enter their anaerobic heartrate zone.

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Planning Training
To avoid mediocrity in your century performances, plan out each week of training before doing a single workout. You might even want to plan out your entire season using the macrocycle system utilized by most experienced bicycling coaches today. If you wish to go into this much depth, get a book by a knowledgeable cyclist or coach - such as Greg Lemond, Joe Friel or Chris Carmichael - and structure a training schedule around the events that are most important to you. If you would rather spend less time planning and more time riding, plan week by week and adhere to one simple adage: never train without a goal. Plan your goal for the day and then go out and do it.

Although broadening your aerobic base is necessary, you should not devote more than three days a week to long, aerobic rides. Presumably, you can already survive a century. You know that. So now you need to focus on riding 100-miles faster. Riding excessive long, slow miles will not help increase your speed. Devoting several days a week to strength and power workouts, however, will increase your speed by raising your average speed, increasing your power in windy conditions and boosting your hill-climbing abilities.

As an example of power workouts to lower your century time, see Ed Pavelka's article Speed the Spontaneous Way. In the next column, I'll give you other examples of anaerobic workouts.; They will hurt more than the aerobic workouts but they will also make you faster. Remember ... pain now will bring you pride later.

Training for Centuries

• Part 1: Choosing A Century to Ride
• Part 2: Riding Fast Century
• Part 3: Strength Training
• Part 4: Planning Workouts
• Part 5: Power on the Bike
• Part 5: Power on the Bike
• Part 6: Moving to Longer Rides