New training plan for May – Adding BMX training
Over the bank holiday weekend I have been riding the BMX every day and it has been wiping me out for the rest of the day. This has meant that I haven’t been keeping up with the 10000 every day as I had planned to. I have decided that I will dial back a bit on the walking to 5 days a week now as I am starting to try and bring more BMX into my training to get back in shape ready for the season to start again.
During the week I am planning to at a minimum do 2 sprint sessions a week and really focus on keeping my core tight as I have got into the habit of flopping around when I pedal which not only wastes a lot of energy is way slower!
I have also decided that I am going to get another 20″ to train on as the last time I trained on a 20″ and raced on a cruiser I was the fastest that I had ever been on a cruiser! I have not decided yet but I may double bike at regionals this year as I am only going to do the 2 races to qualify for the Brits and may also double bike at the Brits too. I will see how I feel on the 20″ but I will also race the 20″ in the Bristol summer series anyway but I may also alternate the bikes to get used to swapping bikes all the time.
At weekends I have gates at Bristol on Saturdays and gates at Bath in Sunday’s when not racing so my weekends are already full of riding.
I am currently struggling to get the cruiser set up how I like it as the bars feel too low still so today I am going to put some higher bars on the bike to see if they improve the feel of the bike at all as at the moment I feel like I am bent over the bars all the time which is not ideal. If that doesn’t help then I will need to get a top loader stem as well!
When I took the S&M race bars off they didn’t appear to be much lower than the taller S&M Bruiser bars so I decided to add the top loader stem that I had lying around which was an Animal Freestyle stem off of my Park bike. It will do for testing then I will buy a race top loader stem once I am happy with the setup as this stem needs to go back on my park bike for me to use it!
It is really weird how the top loader stem makes the bars look really high compared to the front loader stem that I took off but I suppose that it does make the bars higher anyway!
I am now getting ready to pop to the track to do some testing and also get some sprints in as well as its my first Tuesday sprint session of the year! (Well for at least 2 years to be honest!).
I have been thinking some more about the 20″ and I have decided to not get one onw and stick with the Curtis this season and get it fully dialled in before messing about with getting a 20″ or even getting another Yess Type X frame that I was planning on doing! I am starting to feel way better on the Curtis and once I get the bar height sorted I think that I will be super happy on it and I can start to be competitive on it too. I want to get the Profile elite 20mm hub built up when I get paid so that I am not using the 10mm to 20mm adapters on the bike and then I want to save to get a 20mm Onyx rear hub built up to just use when racing Nationals to give me a bit more chance of staying with people to the first berm at least.
After the success of my 10000 step challenge last month I have seen the need to be consistent, so my focus this year is all about being consistent with my training and building up slowly so that my body doesn’t break down! I have decided that for this month I will not walk and ride on the same day when I am working to reduce the amount of stress on my body. Also so far riding has totally wiped me out for the rest of the day so it is hard to get 10000 steps in anyway!
I am super happy at where my fitness is for pre-training and I was able to reduce the amount of aches and pains that I have by walking every day and also using the back stretcher as well. Also reducing my BMX cranks from 180mm to 170mm has got rid of the knee pain that I was suffering! I also think that having to reduce my gearing from 37 x 16 to 36 x 16 to fit the Curtis Frame will have also helped a lot too! In my last gates session I was starting to get my second and third pedal back and I managed to cut out stopping pedalling after the snap too which showed as I managed to beat a couple of the quick guys to the first jump on a couple of gates and was with them for most of the gates so slowly progressing! The main thing that I need to fix now is my body position out of the gate as it is way slower and way less efficient. To get out of this habit I need to concentrate on keeping a tight core whilst sprinting which I will do today when I do my sprints. I have also packed my go pro and tripod so that I can record my sprints and some of my manuals to analyse to improve my positioning on every attempt.
Yesterday I started to practice the 3rd straight on the Bath track as it is a bit more challenging than the 1st straight and I hardly ever ride it as it is more difficult for me than the 1st straights which I can pretty much do in my sleep! I am going to try and not do 1st straights this month and force myself out of my comfort zone to try and progress a bit and work on doing manuals on jumps that I am not comfortable with like I will come across on other tracks. I also really need to work on my flat ground skills (manuals and pedal manuals) as they are pretty bad at the moment and I struggle on longer jumps like the second at Bristol. To try and work on this I am going to try and find 30 minutes a day to practice them so that by the time racing comes along I should be a bit better at them!