The Off Season and My Favorite President

There's a law on the books in Washington state that requires a driver of a motor car follow behind an individual on horseback holding a lantern. (seriously) Nowadays, this is nearly as preposterous as the concept of an "off season" in endurance sports. The "off season", like motor cars following lanterns, is fast approaching the status of LSD (long slow distance...not to be mistaken for long steady distance). I believe these ideas are all representative of another time period and are no longer relevant in modern times.

Apparently, the Washington law predates the advent of headlights and for it's time was a very important law. Obviously, with the introduction of streetlights, as well as headlights, enforcing this code became unnecessary, if not silly. Likewise, the idea of an "off season" predates the accurate tracking of elements of training and racing stress such as volume and intensity. Just as there was a need for a lantern when there were no other sources of light, there was a need for a period of down-time when athletes trained with little understanding of just where their fitness and their freshness were in relation to each other during a season. And similar to the negative impact we'd see today if there were thousands of lantern carrying horseback riders riding in front of automobiles in downtown Seattle during winter rush hour, the "off season" can wreak almost as much havoc on year over year improvement in endurance sports.

With the availability of training tools like cyclingpeakssoftware's performance management charts, athletes and their coaches can get a better understanding of where their current fitness is relative to any point during the season and in relation to recent training load. Along with being able to track cycling training stress, it allows a method for the team to build training load at a rate the individual can handle and to be able to pinpoint those scenarios where good/great performances are likely.

By looking at simple charts like these the team can understand where the athlete is not only in terms of fitness, but also in terms of freshness. With athletes I coach, after the last race of the season, we do allow for a reduction of chronic (think 6 week) training load to a level at which the individual can get a little breather and not lose too much after their last race. This is typically, under ideal circumstances, a Chronic Training Load from which we'll be able to build up to their race "fitness" in roughly 8-12 weeks, depending on race length. Training composition varies quite a bit from week to week until that time out from which we're 8-12 weeks away from racing. Once we've rebuilt CTL (or base, if you will) it remains fairly constant for that athlete. The old way of not touching your bike and/or swimming and running are gone like the sight of lanterns on main street.


Instead of refighting the battles of last season by taking a couple months off, the athlete's I coach maintain thresholds to within 90% of the previous years' peaks and keep a relatively high training load. These athletes don't get "burned out" because they are never in a position where they are rushed to get fit from a detrained state. They emerge from what other's call an "off season" fitter and are far less fatigued when riding with their "rested" counterparts. We have a firm grip on where the athlete's thresholds and fitness are relative to their history and to where they are compared to where we expect them to go in the upcoming season. There are no accidental peaks...they come when we plan them to come.

I remember a quote from Lance Armstrong when asked what he does after the season ends. To paraphrase, he said "I ride my bike every day, but start to train when threshold drops 50W"...that's about 10% of his peak power at VO2 max. Perhaps my favorite quote regarding preparation for the upcoming season was by Abraham Lincoln (apparently speaking about something other than triathlon) "if I had 6 hours to cut down a tree, I would spend 4 hours sharpening the axe". Note that he didn't say he'd spend 2 hours making the axe dull, then rush to hopefully sharpen it back up in time to cut the tree down.

Don't give back too much if you want to see gains next season...