Dr Hutch: How to prepare for disastrous underperformance at a bike race

I recently took a wrong turn in life and entered a bike race. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s only a very few weeks away. I’m recovering from a spring where I caught cold after cold followed by Covid. I have no business going near a bike race. And now I have the problem of how I prepare for this.

Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine.

To illustrate the issue, here is a conversation I had with my friend Bernard, who has vast experience of preparing for disastrous underperformance in competitive cycling events. 

“I’ve got four weeks to go, and I’m less fit than I have ever been in June, and in that I include the June where I had a broken hip.”

“I really wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

“You think I can get ready in time?”

“Absolutely not. But you’re so late and so unfit there’s no point in trying. You’ll just make things worse by transforming yourself from an unfit lump to an exhausted unfit lump.

Just try to enjoy the next four weeks. They may be all you have left.”

I will, as you would expect, ignore this. I’ll do what any right-thinking rider would do and panic train.

I know what I ought to do. I should make a careful training plan, planning out the key sessions between now and the event, allowing adequate recovery, and all of that. I refuse to do this, because it would mean looking at a calendar and that would only emphasise just how very close the event already is.

I also know that I should keep the volume modest, and increase the load gradually. The ideal way to prepare would be to start with the bits of fitness that you can gain really quickly, like increasing my level of aerobic enzymes and my blood-plasma volume level. That would point to some shortish rides with a few harder efforts, good recovery and good nutrition.

Don’t worry, I’ll be ignoring this too. If you want to know why, just look at the solid reasoning and evident good sense. Proper panic training does not acknowledge the blunt realities of physiology. Panic training is not about training, it’s about panic.

Instead I’ll be throwing everything at this, in a random order. There will be volume. I will not be ramping this up by some sort of weekly percentage because that sort of thing is for people who planned properly. I’ll just start riding 450 km a week.

There will be quality. Lots of intervals, selected for the amount of discomfort they produce and how quickly they produce it. If the quality starts to fall away due to what I imagine will be fairly large amounts of fatigue I will not be knocking any of these sessions on the head. I will do them as if I’d been told to by a judge.

I will fling all the tricks I know at this. I will include things like heat training, for the extra metabolic load they create, and to hell with whether or not the event is going to be warm. I will do some hypoxic altitude simulation. Not enough of it to actually produce any real altitude training effect, just enough to make me a bit more tired and a bit more confused.

I will avoid strength and conditioning, and doubly avoid any sort of mobility or stretching. These are not things that scratch the panic itch. 

And at the end of four weeks I’ll be no fitter than I was, I’ll just be tired, like Bernard said. But what he missed out was the other possibility – the very high likelihood that I’ll be injured. And then I can gracefully withdraw on the basis that I did my absolute best and due to circumstances beyond my control, etc.