What are your goals?
What are your goals?
Fleeman says it’s important to tailor your training to your goals and his preparation for the Hill Climbing Championships would, naturally, follow a very different path to the build-up for a road race.
As a result, when planning a training session built around hill repeats, it’s also important to keep in mind what your ambition is.
If you are training purely for a hill climbing event, it will pay dividends to you keep your sessions short, Fleeman explains. If it is to conquer the climbs on a sportive or in a road race, however, a good volume also needs to be considered.
“For a one-off climb, like, for example, the Hill Climbing Championships, it’s only a one-off effort so it’s really important to be fresh,” he explains. “You should drastically reduce the amount of training you do. When I was training for hill climbs I’d literally only be doing an hour’s hard training each day.
“I’d just ride to a hill, do a few reps [as described on page two] and then go home. If you are fresh you can go really deep for a short time – but you can’t maintain it.
“To train for a longer event you would need to be going for longer rides and incorporating the hill work into that [to replicate the efforts required over a longer event]. If you were just training for a hill climb then you don’t need the volume.”
But how can you prepare for a mountainous sportive, if you only have short, sharp climbs to train on?