Training - Zwift Sprint, 21.67 seconds

Things have been super busy with me lately and it's hard to find time to post stuff in the blog. One thing that I've been doing is riding the trainer while logged into Zwift. I usually go for the green jersey sprint (a timed few hundred virtual meters sprint). I occasionally go hard on the KOM (my best time is over 3 minutes, typically it takes me 5-7 minutes).

Zwift awards you a boost when you cross a line (start/finish, KOM, sprint). Boosts can be weight reduction (15 seconds long, worth a few kg), aero (30 seconds, worth a second or two over a 30 second super hard effort), drafting (30 seconds, like drafting a truck if you're behind someone, otherwise it's nothing), etc.

If you don't use the boost (press the Space bar to use it) then at the next banner you don't get another one.

If I get an aero boost I feel obligated to save it until the Green Jersey sprint segment. Of course when I soft pedal through stuff I don't get the aero boost, and when I do a "okay this is the last sprint of the night" sprint I inevitably earn another aero boost. I've often ridden another 30-35 minute lap to use up that aero boost and I've extended a ride an hour at least once when on that "really the last sprint of the night sprint" I get yet another aero boost.

To give you an idea of what it's like during one of those sprints here's a short clip I made of a Green Jersey sprint on Watopia, the Zwift island. I got an aero boost at the prior banner (the KOM) so I was psyched to have it for the one sprint I planned on recording.

Enjoy!

Screen shot from the ride.

Your hoods are jacked! Or why I hate "ergo" bars

With props to Rob M for the name of the topic.

I was on a ride in California and saw a rider with what I call a "classic" bar and lever position. The bottom end of the drops pointed back at some point around the rear brake or just above it and the lever bodies were just above pointing straight forward. Essentially a low position overall.

I mention this because I also saw a lot of riders with hoods way up the drops, almost high enough to start moving in to the tops of the bar. I call this the jacked lever position after Mr Rob used the term in a funny email. I've seen other bits on why they think bars and lever started pointing up so much and I'll chip in with my two cents.

It first started with the abominable "ergo" handlebars, those with the flat section on the drops. No one really had a great idea on where this flat section should be or at what angle. For example 3ttt had some models where the ergo section was almost vertical and others where it was just above horizontal. And this was in the same year!

The problem is as follows - rider hand position requirements on the drops changes depending on the rider's current situation. For example if you are just cruising along on the drops, don't need a lot of leverage, and are simply guiding the bike with a light touch to the bars, you'll need a relatively horizontal section of bar. The flats of the "old" style rounded bars works, or, if using "ergo" bars, a more horizontal ergo section works.

However, if in the middle of your cruising along someone jumps past you and you want to react, your needs change dramatically. Instead of a light touch on the bars, you want a firm base from where you can pull and push to counter aggressive leg movements. You want to hold the drops further up so that your forearms are more level - this prevents them from your forearms from hitting the tops of the bars too hard. And you'll probably want access to your shift/brake levers so you can shift up as you accelerate. This means you'll need to choke the drops. A more vertical "ergo" section satisfies this need.

But there are no ergo bars which satisfy BOTH drop type positions. This is because combining the two ergo sections would result in a, err, rounded bar. What you might know as a non-ergo bar.

Hm.

Incidentally bar manufacturers are now coming out with "super-ergo" bars. What makes them interesting is that they no longer have highly defined ergo positions. They're simply rounded bars.

Ergo bars helped contribute to the jacked lever syndrome. Once the ergo bars came around it was virtually impossible to shift from the drops. Well, you could, it's just that you couldn't do it easily while, say, sprinting. At the same time there was this movement towards radically low bars. Case in point: Michele Bartoli. If you copied his radical seat-to-bar drop position, you'd end up riding on the hoods a lot, have a backache, or both.

If you rode mainly on the hoods, well, jacked levers are more comfortable. And since you couldn't shift while sprinting, unless you had some odd looking vertical ergo bars, being able to reach the shifters from the drops suddenly dropped in priority. So levers went higher and higher.

Check out Lance for example. His bike is the epitome of jacked lever syndrome. Why do pros use ergo bars with jacked levers? Shouldn't us mortals be satisfied with what the pros use?

No.

Pros have simpler needs than us normal riders. They are either going a very steady easy or a very steady hard. They rarely launch vicious attacks with lots of shifting and stuff - that's for us amateurs who can't make efforts longer than anything measured in seconds or minutes. Their attacks are more of a "ride the legs off the other guy" kind of thing. And for that type of hard riding, the light touch position works. You hunker down into a position that you know you can hold for 20k and try and rip the teeth off your 12T.

My attacks are something like, "Oh, well, I was on the right side of the field, I figured I should go, and I popped it in the 14 and went super hard. Then I dropped it into the 13 and then the 12. Man I was flying. I looked and saw I had a gap. Then I tried to recover a bit but by the backstretch I was toast. I had to go back to the 14 and the field caught me."

And that kind of attack takes place over, say, 60 seconds.

Roy Knickman, racing for La Vie Claire, once took the leader's jersey in the Tour de L'Avenir. He told the interviewer he decided to attack on a long, flat, crosswind section of road. His attack was pretty straightforward. He simply went to the front of the field and rode really hard in the gutter for 20 km. The gutter because the crosswind meant that to draft him you'd have to be next to him and if he was in the gutter, you couldn't draft him. The whole field strung out as they cursed him and rode in the gutter after him. After 20 km, he looked back to see who was back there.

One severely suffering guy.

Knickman told him to pull. The guy probably looked at him like, "What are you insane? I've been groveling in the gutter for 20 k while you've been pounding beef." Whatever, the answer was negative. So Knickman said to him "Oh yeah? I'm a BAMF and I'm going to grind your legs to a pulp", put it in the 12T, and rode in the gutter for another 20 km. Okay he didn't say that but he did ride that. After going really hard for another 20 kms, meaning he's been hammering for something like an hour (think of how long it takes you to ride 40 km or 25 miles), he looked back at the guy and said, "If you don't pull, I'll do that again, drop you, and you'll get your sorry ass fired for not being able to stay on my wheel while not taking a pull for an hour."

Okay he didn't say that either. But the other guy started to pull.

Knickman moved over to let the guy get some shelter, they gained over 9 minutes, then Knickman turned off the power. The field thought the two had blown. The bunch eased off, cruised a bit, did the math, and figured out when they should start chasing. On cue, they put the collective hammer down and started what they thought would be a nicely timed pounce to scoop up the break with a few kilometers to go.

That's when Knickman turned the gas back on. The pounce was all air as Knickman pounded just as hard as all the teams in the field combined. The two ended the day about 8 minutes ahead of the field. Knickman took the lead by five minutes.

From what I could tell Knickman, it seems, rarely needed to shift that day. He didn't have jacked hoods (he's old school) but if he had three speed bars it wouldn't have mattered. The point is that he didn't need super quick access to the shifters.

If you were on his wheel, what good would it do if you could shift really quickly? Nada. You'd be as toasted as everyone else in the field as you flail through your gears really fast. Toast doesn't make pros go fast and everyone, even the eventual winner, was left behind.

The winner's name? A young, upcoming Spanish rider named Miguel Indurain.

Unfortunately Knickman got sick and dropped out about a week after his heroic ride.

Anyway, I think I've illustrated my point. Pros are really, really strong. They don't need no stinkin' fast shifts. They just hammer.

And the really big pros, the ones that do the Tour and stuff, the ones in the magazines, well, they climb a lot. And I mean a LOT. For me, 150 meters is a climb. I shift. I prepare. I psych myself up. And I hit it. And at the top I think, "Phew, I made it, wow that was a hard 8 pedal strokes."

Pros don't even notice 150 meter climbs. They don't call it a climb till it takes 5 or 10 minutes to finish. And those are the short ones. It's the 30 or 45 minute climbs which determine, say, the Tour. So for riders targeting those days, it's important to optimize the bike for climbing for what would seem like forever, not for something inane like jumps or sprinting.

There's no questioning that if you're climbing for a while, jacked hoods are more comfy. Your wrist bends a bit less. You feel like you're a bit taller on the bike. And there's a secure feeling when you grasp the hoods, stand up, and lean forward. Hence the jacked hoods in the pro peloton.

But that's not the real world. That's the pro's world.

I don't race 150 miles in the mountains, up 10 or 15 mile climbs. Neither does anyone I race against. In fact, I think I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who was not a pro that raced a 150 mile road race with 10 or 15 mile climbs.

Like everyone in the real world, I do dinky crits which pros wouldn't even consider a warm up. The pace varies wildly - sometimes we're going 18 mph, other times I'm hanging on at 35 mph. Guys blow up, they sit up, and we slow. Or someone attacks, everyone else swears, and we go bananas for a lap or so, shifting furiously into our bigger gears, the field stringing out, everyone frantically looking for shelter.

In races like those you're shifting all the time. And you're virtually always in the drops, since that's where you should be when you're making efforts, cornering hard, riding in super close quarters, etc.

And, if you have jacked hoods, you won't be able to shift when you're on the drops.

Problem.

Simple solution: lower your levers a bit and enjoy the chaos in the working class races.

Leave the jacked hoods to those climbing gods.

How To - Working on sprinting

Inevitably people ask me about sprint workouts. There are a lot of different ideas floating around out there and many of them do help with your sprint. For me, though, sprint workouts should include a few things:
1. Fun
2. Speed and a feeling of going really fast
3. Optimize maximum speed

Doing 100% all out efforts is not easy. I no longer have the mental gumption to do anything really hard that lasts longer than, say, a minute. Sprinting is fun for me and therefore I enjoy doing sprint workouts, I don't get burnt out, and I don't mind exerting myself for the 30-60 seconds necessary for a sprint.

The only thing is that the workouts don't seem right if you don't finish an effort and say "Boy was I flying!". Maybe you're working on going faster so you're thinking, "Boy I wish I was a bit faster!" That's fine. But if you finish an effort and think, "I really think I should have been able to beat that guy on the Huffy with flat tires riding to work" then maybe it's time to take a break and do the workout a different day.

The most important part of sprinting, and a thing that I've never seen mentioned anywhere, is that you absolutely have to work on increasing your maximum speed. It can be on a flat road or one that's very slightly downhill, but you have to increase your maximum speed.

Max speed not only helps your sprint but it also makes any other racing incrementally easier. If your max speed is 31 mph and an attack goes off at 35 mph, you'll be in trouble. If your max speed is 37 mph, you'll be hanging on for dear life. But if it's 42 mph you'll easily manage a 35 mph attack.

Workouts

Please keep in mind that these workouts should be done by riders after they've gotten cleared by their doctors. Also, although everyone can increase their max speed, you will not be able to transform a non-sprinting rider into a pure sprinter. It takes more to beat a pure sprinter than just sprinting against them head to head.

Determine Maximum Optimal Sprint Speed

My favorite jump/sprint workout (after you've warmed up and are sweating a bit) is to find a slight (1-5%) downhill followed by a flat section the length you require for a sprint (at least 200m). Use the downhill as your "leadout" and jump as hard as possible at your start point (on the flat). Try doing this in a cross/tail wind and keep track of your max speeds. As an alternative to the downhill, draft large motorized vehicles to help bring you up to speed. This speed will be your maximum optimal sprint speed (MOSS).

Hey I made up an acronym!

You can do these sprints weekly to keep track of your MOSS (say 3-10 times on the day you do it). Twice a week might be maximum, otherwise you end up just overdoing it. You'll find the speeds creeping up naturally.

As a "normal" racer, i.e. a Cat 3-5, your minimum MOSS should be 31-32 mph. In other words, you really, really need to hit that speed. It's better if you can hit 35-38 mph and you'll probably find yourself at that speed as a late Cat5 or a new Cat 4. And if you can break 40-42 mph, you're in Cat 3 race placing territory. 44-46 mph will win you races. Remember, this is an "optimal" sprint, one where you're relatively fresh and have a perfect "leadout".

Once you get an idea of your MOSS in the workout above, do some other types of sprint workouts to try and increase your MOSS.

Alternate Gear Sprint Workout

Sprint from a rolling start up to your maximum speed and alternate gears high and low. Try alternating between a 53x14 and 53x17 for starters (I think that will be the lowest pair of gears usable - whatever pair you use, you should have a 3-4 tooth gap for your two gears). You'll think the easy gear is easy when you first start the workout, but as your legs fatigue, you'll really be jonesing for the big gear interval - the little gear is so hard to spin fluently once fatigued. (Note: this is why roadies sprint in big gears and trackies sprint in little gears).

The alternating gear workout helps you learn the difference between "pushing" and "spinning". Since this is not an optimal speed workout, you may not hit your max speeds, even in the bigger gears. This is normal - I find myself losing about 10-15% of my top end speed.

Group Sprint Workout

The best sprint workouts I ever got was a Tues night sprint ride at a local university on a 2 mile loop (SUNY Purchase for those in the NYC area). Approximately 50-150 riders of all levels (up to Cat 1, national team riders - Jessica Greico was probably the best known racer who regularly showed up) would show up for 2-3 hours. Approx 1km-long committed leadouts (started on a 200 meter slight downhill followed by an undulated 800-1000 meters) by numerous leadout riders meant the leadout would typically hit 35-38 mph on a slow day and 40+mph on a fast day.

The top speeds I observed were typically 42-46 mph on the 200m slight downgrade to the line. 15-20 sprints really cooked your legs and I learned a lot of tactics and techniques on sprinting by doing these sprints. I learned that if you have the power, you can jump really hard even if you're going really fast already. I also learned that you can fake-jump hard enough to draw out non-sprinters one or two times, then sprint for real. Finally I got to work on my bike throw a lot.

Group sprint workouts are motivating, fun, and slightly dangerous. With the fun and competitiveness of group sprints, you also end up with a chance of either accidents or poor riders causing problems. Keep your head up and remember it's not a race, even though you might be sprinting as if it were one.

Urban Sprint Workout

Another workout is the "urban sprint workout". I personally enjoy sprinting with cars in city traffic. Pick a loop that has all one-way traffic (or median'ed roads so there is no one driving towards you). I have a favorite 2 mile loop and the speed limit is 30 or 35 mph which means drivers go 35-40 mph. This is perfect for motorpacing up to my jump point, 200 meters from a nice crosswalk.

My sprint speed varies wildly with traffic, wind, and my legs - it may be as low as 34 mph and as high as 48 mph (well, on one day I hit that mark a few times). Doing this workout with friends is more consistent since they're on bikes and it's easier to hold their wheels. But doing it alone is fine. Trucks are a rare treat so they receive the most magnetic drafting attention possible.

When I worked in NYC going up and down the large Avenues was a real treat. Synchronized lights, some semblence of awareness of cyclists, and everyone driving 35 mph or so.

Group Rides (with sprint lines)

Many group rides have one or two sprint lines incorporated into the route. These are excellent places to practice sprinting for a number of reasons:
1. Lots of riders, many of whom you don't really know.
2. Only one chance at each line.
3. Natural variables like wind, temperature, pack riding patterns subtlely alter the demands of the sprint.
4. Natural competition.
Group rides are like races because you don't know everyone (and their habits), you have only one chance at the line, a lot of people want to beat you, and you won't know the conditions at the sprint till you get there.

I do one group ride only for its sprints. Sometimes I'm on my own (no teammates), sometimes I have friends or allies (teammates or simply allies), but I suffer like a dog to be able to contest the first sprint. To be completely frank, I rarely make it with the group to the second sprint. Therefore the first sprint is the one I pinpoint.

It's a real treat when someone you don't necessarily know too well decides to lead you out. It's even better when that rider is far better than you. One sprint that I particularly liked was in NY when one guy (Ray Diaz, one tough racer, second from left in this picture) tried to lead out his less experienced teammate. I heard them talking a bit, Ray was pointing at the riders to watch, so I figured they'd be a good leadout. With 500 meters to go I managed to squirm my way onto Ray's wheel and he looked back, read the scene (me on his wheel, his buddy on mine) and decided to keep the leadout going. This was awesome!

The only problem was that Ray wasn't ramping up the speed the way I preferred. I love sprints where I'm being led out at 40+ mph, where it's a struggle just to hang onto the wheel in front. It makes the actual sprint a lot more decisive. Ray's leadout didn't seem like one of these. In his defense, this was a mid-ride sprint and there are a couple false flats immediately after the sprint that are leg breakers right after a hard effort.

I figured that since I wasn't his teammate (and Ray's teammate was on my wheel), Ray would keep the speed a little lower and force me to jump early (and lead out his teammate). It worked. I got worried that we'd get swarmed and started to ride a bit to his side, trying to ride as "wide" as possible, drawing my front wheel to his bottom bracket area. After sitting there for about 5 seconds, I decided I had to go (after all I had very little benefit from the draft and I was actually helping those behind me). I launched very early, sat up when I had a big gap, and soft pedaled about 100 meters to the line. I didn't contest when one furiously sprinting rider "caught" me at the line - after all, I was satisfied with the gap I opened and my sprint in general, and I was already recovering for the upcoming false flats. To Ray's credit, the group was completely strung out behind me so I was being a bit paranoid on the swarming bit.

Ray rode up to me afterwards. He was grinning (it seems like everyone involved in fun sprints grins afterwards) and told me I could have won if I'd waited. I pointed out I could have pedaled a bit to win the sprint but I had been more concerned with working on field positioning and my actual sprint (the physical bit of sprinting, not the bike throw). I also mentioned that I figured he wasn't ramping up the speed so as to force me to go earlier.

"But I was going 37 mph!" he protested.
"Exactly.. too slow!"
We laughed.

I told him if he'd been holding 40 mph, I would have felt comfortable waiting. 37 mph - well it seemed like a feint to me. I think he thought I was joking, but I wasn't. A couple more mph and no one would have thought about moving up early.

He laughed at my remark and rode up to the front of the group to proceeded to make mincemeat out of everyone's legs, mine included. That was the difference between him and me. While he was at the front merrily pulling away right after a huge effort, I groveled at the back to try and make it to the second sprint. I don't remember anything about that sprint so I am guessing I got popped sometime before it.

By the way I'm a lowly Cat 3 (1 being national level and 5 being beginner) and although I can sprint reasonably well, there are a lot of guys who sprint way better than I do. I mention the speeds because in Cat 3 races, although they may average 25-27 mph for an hour, typically contain short bursts at 36-38 mph to bridge to a break, attacks at up to 42 mph, and generally things are going fast only after we're going over 31 mph.

Anyway, I hope these tips help you with your sprinting.

Oh I forgot one more tip on sprinting.

If you're sprinting against Aki, forget everything he ever said about sprinting.