The pro-life and ability to live in a warm, sunny country may seem like a great escape from the winter conditions in which the rest of us ride. But even for top pros who have moved to places like Monaco, indoor training is part of the job and an essential part of staying fit and working on their strengths and weaknesses during the winter.
Even on southern France’s Côte d’Azur, it can be wet and windy, while the cold can be bitter a few miles inland. The coastal strip along the Mediterranean seaboard is undulating and usually busy, so there’s limited opportunity for intervals and other form-building sessions outdoors.
The weather can force riders indoors even in supposedly sunny climes. In 2017, pros arriving in Calpe in Spain for their late-January winter training camps were met with wet snowfall on the coast roads, resulting in mass turbo sessions in their hotels’ conference rooms.
Meanwhile, pros targeting the early season races may choose to stay in Northern Europe so they’re better prepared for the conditions they’ll encounter during the race itself, says Jacob Tipper of Jacob Tipper Performance Coaching, himself a former UK-based pro rider. That means that there are sometimes days when the conditions just aren’t safe enough to train outdoors.
Mac Cassin of Wahoo’s sports science team concurs. Team coaches may prefer that their athletes do the hard work indoors, where there’s less risk of crashing and injury, he says.
They may schedule two sessions in a day, a hard, structured indoor ride where they can put in intensive efforts followed by a multi-hour ride outdoors to build endurance. An indoor session followed by riding outdoors also breaks up the training routine mentally for a pro who is typically riding tens of thousands of kilometres in a year.
Tipper points out that during race season, a pro may not need or have time to do a huge volume of conventional training due to their race schedule and the need to travel between race venues.
“This means the winter can be a very important time to really focus on specifics. If that means targeting a specific threshold or specific energy system, then the turbo can be a good way of controlling that,” he says.
An opportunity to focus
Indoor training has always been part of the…
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