This being a cycling site, we are bound to talk about aerobic fitness from time to time, and as Robot brought up our aerobic engines on a recent episode of The Paceline, I’m our anointed pundit. Honestly, it feels like if we are going to talk about oxygen-burning beasts, we should call my former Paceline co-host Selene Yeager. She won an Ironman, not to mention a bunch of Iron Crosses, something I suspect no one else on this planet has done. Ah, but I’m in the hot seat. Okay, here we go.
The first thing I’m going to say is that while I had some talent, I wasn’t gifted with lots of talent. I think that’s an important thing to establish. The true cardiovascular freaks show their talent even before they are all that trained. They are the riders who can hang with anything straight off the couch.
That’s a 1 in 10k person. Here’s an example of what that looks like: There was an American pro back in the 1980s and 90s named Andy Bishop. In one of his first races, an uphill time trial, he started near the back of the field with the Cat. 4s. The Cat 1s started first, then the 2s and so on. He rode out of the 4s, through the 3s and finished near the 1s and 2s. He recorded the fastest time that day by a stunning margin. The officials decided he cheated, even though all the evidence they had said he didn’t, so not only didn’t he win, he was DQ’d. Bishop got the last laugh when his picture showed up in VeloNews less than a year later wearing the jersey of the top Dutch team, PDM.
I was not like that. I had to work. I spent years putting in seasons of between 8,000 and 12,000 miles. There was one year where I was, shall we say, rather lightly employed, and I put in close to 15,000 miles. To put this in perspective, I was trying to earn my Category 2 upgrade. I wanted to see if I could be good enough to be in the same race as the pros. I knew I wouldn’t be competitive against them, but I wanted to be there when they unleashed.
What people don’t understand about cycling is time in the saddle, just time in the saddle pedaling, not suffering, just with your heartrate elevated, that will do wonders for fitness.
I had a friend that I did thousands and thousands of miles with in the late ‘90s. Mike Horeff. I guy I miss to this day. Mike and I would often do our Tuesday/Thursday group ride, known as the Pier Ride and then when we got back to the Manhattan Beach Pier one of us would ride up to the other, if we weren’t already next to each other in the paceline, and ask, “Secret miles?” More often than not we’d nod, and then turn around and head north on the bike path. We would get an extra hour of riding in. Do that two days a week and at the end of a month that’s an extra eight hours of training. That adds up over the course of a season. I’d do all sorts of things to squeeze in extra miles for aerobic training. A few weeks each year, I’d train seven days in a row, making sure I kept my heart rate down, and sometimes squeezing in a second ride in the evening after work.
You want to be a monster? Do a training ride in the morning. Ride into work. Work. Ride home. Do that regularly and people won’t be able to sit on your wheel.
Here’s my single biggest takeaway from that time: In general, people have no idea how broad a spectrum of fitness is possible for human beings. In so many ways our operating range is terribly narrow. We see but a tiny band of all of the radiation the universe produces. We call that visible light. If we’re naked, we need to be kept within a roughly 40-degree temperature range. Given the range of temperatures in the universe—from absolute zero to tens of thousands of degrees, again, we exist in a stupidly narrow band. But the difference between the folks on shows like The Biggest Loser and the guy who finishes in last place at the Tour de France is VAST.
Looking at my training diaries some years back, I calculated the difference between being competitive as a Cat 4 and being competitive as a Cat 3—by this I mean strong enough to get to the front and make people suffer at the end of the race, when it counts—was about 3 hours per week of training. From 15 hours on average to 18 hours on average. But that’s also if you were pretty disciplined in your training. If you weren’t all that disciplined, then add three more hours per week. And the super-disciplined could shave two or three hours off, provided they are sticking with crits.
In my racing, I came to a host of conclusions about fitness. One of the conclusions I drew is that aerobic fitness doesn’t chart as a linear function. It exists on an exponential curve. The difference between the average cyclist and the rider who is lining up and finishing races in the pack is an order of magnitude. It’s another order of magnitude to winning Cat 4 races. From there, it’s another order of magnitude to being competitive in the 3s, not winning. It’s another order of magnitude to winning the 3s convincingly. Another order of magnitude to finishing a Pro/1/2 race with the field. Another order of magnitude to win as a 2. Another for winning against pros. Another to be strong enough to win a smaller pro race, another to winning a classic or grand tour stage. There’s an order of magnitude difference between the riders in the top five of the tour and the guys who sit from 10th to 20th.
Put another way, it’s that thing we often hear racers say: He had an extra gear. That’s what I’m talking about.
At my fittest I was sometimes shocked by what I could do, but that great quote from Greg LeMond is absolutely true:
“It never hurts any less. You just go faster.”
I will say, the pain becomes more tolerable. I can’t explain that, but the nature of the pain seems to change. That said, it’s also true that the worst I ever suffered was in Cat 3 races. I pushed myself harder in races than I have doing anything else.
So here’s my bottom line: No matter what someone thinks their overall talent level is, I can promise you you are wrong about just how fit you can become through training. But there are no shortcuts. It’s butt in saddle. There’s no substitute for time, but simply doing the miles will do wonders.