First, what are your goals for next year?
- Do you want to win some races or perhaps move up a race category?
- Are you going on a once in a lifetime European bike trip to celebrate your 50th and want to be confident that the mountains won't be a problem?
- Do you like the social aspect of the Saturday FOG ride best and want to be able to complete it while being able to comfortably chat to people?
- Do you want to be able to rip the legs off of everybody on the weekend ride?
- Do you want to be able to complete the Saturday ride without feeling like you were pushed to your limit the whole time?
- I just want to be able to ride next year as I did this year
The FOG ride is a fairly challenging ride for most people. Whether you want to be able to complete the ride as a comfortable social group ride or push the pace in the fast group it takes a certain level of fitness. You've spent all summer building up your fitness and whether you just want to maintain or whether you want to build on that and take the next step, the first step is not giving up what you've worked so hard to get. De-training (losing fitness) kicks in fairly quickly. An even bigger problem for masters athletes (anyone who regularly participates in FOG rides is an athlete) is that age is also against us and with each passing year once past our 30's our athletic potential declines. It's becomes so much harder to perform at the same level this year as I was able to 3 or 4 years ago or even last year and worse yet once fitness is lost to get it back. So even if my goal for next year is as modest as riding the same next year as this with no improvement at all, that's an uphill challenge.
Over a few posts, let's look at:
- detraining/loss of fitness
- weight gain/loss
- factors specific to masters athletes: loss of muscle mass/strength, steady decline in VO2Max
- what we can do to best keep things in our favour
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