Most of you ride like lost tourists. You head out, you push the pedals, you come home, you check your average on Strava, and you tell yourself: “Good ride, legs are wrecked.”
Cute. Romantic. In performance terms, it is physiological masturbation.
Joe Friel, in his chapter on starting a season (The Cyclist’s Training Bible), is blunt about it: without data you are not an athlete, you are a tourist on a bike. Your brain is an excuse factory. It will tell you you’re flying because you passed a tractor, or that you’re cooked because it’s raining.
Your feeling is your worst enemy. If you want out of mid-pack mediocrity, it’s time for an audit. Build your season like an engineer, not like a poet.
Autopsy on the living
Starting a season or a training plan with no physiological test is building a bridge without knowing the strength of the concrete. Structural suicide.
Friel hammers the Assessment. You have to know what you are worth today. Not what you were worth three years ago when you were “sharp”.
Lab versus reality
The lab is the ideal. Gas mask, blood samples, VO2max, ventilatory thresholds. Absolute truth. But you’re not dropping 300 euros every month, so the answer is the Field Test.
Stop running from the 20-minute test or the Ramp Test. Yes, it hurts. Yes, you’ll want to throw up. That’s the price of the truth. What we’re after is your LTHR (Lactate Threshold Heart Rate) and your FTP. Because if your FTP is wrong, every zone below it is wrong. You think you’re riding sweet spot when you’re actually at threshold (too hard), or recovery that is really endurance (too tiring). You’re flying blind.
The power meter is king
If you still train on heart rate alone, you are twenty years behind. HR is a delayed, noisy physiological response. Slept badly? HR up. Three coffees? HR up. Heatwave? Cardiac drift.
Power is mechanical. 300 watts is 300 watts. Fresh, sick or depressed.
Strava is not an analysis tool
Strava is a social network built to flatter your ego. Segments mean nothing: tailwind? sitting in a truck’s draft?
The real tools, TrainingPeaks, WKO5, GoldenCheetah, look at what counts. Decoupling (Pw:HR) first: when your power holds steady but your heart climbs away from it, your aerobic endurance is pathetic, and that is exactly what we’re measuring. Then the Variability Index, which tells you whether you rode smooth or spent the session sprinting and stopping.
Friel puts it plainly: “Training is testing, and testing is training.” Every ride feeds the database.
Kill the dream, write the plan
There is a hard line between a dream and a goal. “I want to be stronger in the mountains this summer” is noise. “I want to hold 3.8 W/kg for 45 minutes on the Ventoux climb on 15 July” is a plan.
Friel sorts goals into three categories, and so should you:
- Outcome Goals: win the local race, finish the Étape du Tour in the top 1000. Fine, but you don’t control who else shows up on the start line.
- Performance Goals: your own standard. “Put out 280 W NP for 3 hours.” That one is under your control.
- Process Goals: what you do every week. “Sleep 8 hours a night”, “hold my 12 hours in the saddle”, “don’t skip the strength session”.
No date and no number means no goal. You just have a hobby.
Look your limiters in the eye
This is the ugliest part of Chapter 5: naming your limiters.
The classic amateur mistake is training your strengths because they feel good. The climber goes climbing, the rouleur rides the flats. Athletic self-gratification.
To progress you have to work on what’s broken. You’re heavy? Your W/kg is your limiter. Stop buying carbon parts and lose 3 kg of fat. You blow up the second the pace lifts? Your anaerobic capacity is nothing, so go do lactate work, however much you hate it. You hold an hour but crack at three? Your aerobic base is cardboard. Go back to zone 2.
Friel has you score your skills (sprint, time trial, climbing, endurance, tactics) from 1 to 5. Be brutal. If you hand yourself 4s and 5s across the board, you’ve missed the point.
THE CORNERMAN’S PRESCRIPTION
Finished reading? Good. Now you act. Homework for this week. No excuses.
- The truth test: book an FTP test (20-minute or Ramp) before Sunday. Recalibrate your zones. If your FTP has dropped since last year, take it. That’s your new starting point.
- The hardware audit: check the batteries in your power meter. Set your head unit screens to show 3-second power, average power, cadence, HR. Delete average speed, nobody cares.
- The number on paper: write down one goal for six months out. It has to carry a number (watts, W/kg, time) and a date. Tape it to your stem or your fridge.
Stop feeling. Start building.
THE CORNER DOESN’T CUT YOUR HEALTH. The Scalpel cuts the bullshit, not your health. The “lose 3 kg of fat” line documents a personal approach, not a prescription. Below your baseline needs, or at the slightest doubt, see a sports physician.