Sprints

A long ride, long being relative to the individuals capabilities, requires nutrition, hydration, motivation but most importantly good pacing. Putter along too slowly and miss the chance to beat a personal record, charge up the hills and risk burning out before the end. Clearly, for a very long, non-competitive ride, where the goal is to complete within a certain time, sprinting is out of the picture. So why then, do I practice sprints?

Part of it is the old montage "If you want to ride faster, ride faster" which holds more truth than one might think. By going anaerobic for short periods, you deprive the muscles of oxygen and stimulate the growth of more mitochondria in the muscles' cells. Mitochrondria being the "power house" of the cell, responsible for doing the work involved in muscular contractions. You know you're stimulating growth when your legs burn with lactic acid, and feel almost useless hours after a hard ride.

These anaerobic periods can vary anywhere from one to sixty minutes. On 2-3 hour rides I try to include periods of hard effort to go anaerobic and really push myself. These periods last between ten and thirty minutes, but are never structured. The idea is to feel completely wasted at the end of a ride, to deplete your muscles of glycogen so they rebuild themselves stronger than they were, with more glycogen capacity.

Often I don't have time for a 2 hour or longer ride, but can still make progress through a sprint workout in an hour. To do sprints, you need a long, fairly flat or mildly sloping uninterrupted road with light traffic. This is a difficult thing to find when you live in the middle of a sprawling city, especially when it takes about twenty minutes to get into the suburbs for good roads. Fortunately for me, Memorial Hall is only a ten minute ride away, sits in front of a long straight, flat road and makes for painfully scenic sprint workouts. Especially when this is the finish line:

The road is about eight tenths of a mile long, from a traffic light to the Civil War Memorial situated in a fairly decrepit neighborhood in north west Philadelphia. There are three parallel roads and for whatever reason, the one closest to Memorial Hall - "North Concourse Drive" gets the fewest cars, so that's where I do my sprints. The road is a slight grade up from the traffic light at Belmont and about 2/3 of the way to the end is a slight downgrade, where I hit my maximum speed and try to hold it for as long as I can. I'd like a little more room for these, but at least the scenery is nice.

Sprinting is also a way to track fitness. Increasing aerobic and anaerobic ability will allow for longer, more powerful sprints and translate to general riding. By increasing the mitochrondria in your legs, you increase your aerobic power, effectively increasing the pace you feel comfortable cruising at for very long periods, such as in a Brevet. Not only that, but your recovery time for hard efforts such as steep climbs are reduced and the stores of glycogen in your muscles increase, allowing you to do more anaerobic work until your legs are totally shot and the dreaded "death march" begins.

So, sprints do carry over to Brevets.