It’s not often we face endless days of rain in San Diego – in fact its quite shocking to our community if there’s a puddle on the ground. But in our world of endurance sport, and specifically cycling, everything seems to grind to a halt because of the weather.
So, more often than not, my question to the athletes I coach is, “How much do you want it?”
If the weather is shit, but you need a long ride, how do you combat boredom but still get the workload in? Plug in your laptop and warm up with 30 minutes of YouTube content that inspires you (watch an event, a sports documentary, anything that gets you excited), then switch to Pandora and your favorite station for 60-90 minutes worth of intervals. Finish off with a 30-minute WD watching your favorite HBO or Netflix series. BOOM. Time quickly passes and you actually might enjoy some of it.
You can also stand about 60 minutes outside in the crappy weather, do a bunch of intervals close to home then come back inside for another 90 minutes and before you know, you’ve strung together a long ride. Outside/Inside Combo.
Or, if you truly can’t stand the trainer for longer than about an hour, do some “PRE-LOADING” of the muscles to create fatigue before getting on the trainer. For instance, a good squat routine with deadlifts, step ups, box jumps, hops, or lunges. You can even interchange between 10 minutes on trainer, 10 minutes of gym work and rotate through this for a solid couple of hours. Time will fly and the mechanism of overload will still be there in the legs!
Where there’s a will there’s a way. Lets get clever people!
IMAGE SOURCE: XTERRA