Review: The Time-Crunched Cyclist

 With a power meter handy in on my bike I decided to once again try to read a book about serious training to see if I could motivate myself to get stronger for this summers' tour. The Time Crunched Cyclist came up with a web search, and well, with 2 kids, a job, I figured I might qualify under that rubric. For grins, I also checked out the latest edition of The Cyclist's Training Bible (touted as 100% completely rewritten) to compare.

The theory behind The Time Crunched Cyclist is straight forward. Rather than spend hours and hours on your bike building "base miles", the idea is that you will orient your workouts around higher intensity rides. These rides will feature various mini workouts such as power intervals or steady endurance, or climbing intervals, and the total stress on your body will be sufficient to build fitness. The book comes with a warning that it's a challenging program and you would start racing 8 weeks into the program and be able to hold on to your fitness for about 4 weeks after that. Interestingly, reading this book alongside with The Cyclist's Training Bible was a good idea because the other book explains how it works: the idea is that there's a model of your body's response to exercise: training stress score. A cyclist is supposed to get a certain about of training stress in order to build fitness. You can get the same stress from either a long ride with easy miles or a short ride with high intensity. The model gets you to the same place either way.

The huge difference between the two books is that The Cyclist's Training Bible is all about how to build and optimize your ideal training program. The Time Crunched Cyclist is far easier to use because it dispenses with that and just gives you a pre-cooked program and just tells you to follow it for 8-12 weeks. That way you don't have to think about it. There's even a special program for cyclists who bike to work! By contrast The Cyclist's Training Bible warns you against doing bike commuting --- if you're going to race you have to be serious about it and not ride with friends or do anything silly like that.

OK, the problem with both these books are that they're about how to excel in a one day race. The Time Crunched Cyclist claims to prepare you for a 24 hour MTB race or a grand fondo, but even their special "endurance block" training program never has you riding more than 3 hard days in a row. I looked in the index in The Cyclist's Training Bible for stage race, and found the following:

Preparing for an A event that is a stage race requires a different approach to training. With only a few exceptions, the typical stage races for amateurs last three or four days and include three to five stages. There are a few weeklong stage races, but they are rare... The three primary challenges of such races are being physically and mentally prepared for back-to-back races, managing energy expenditure in daily races, and recovering between stages... I need to warn you, however, that such training is quite risky, especialy for the rider who is not capable of managing high levels of such accumulated stress. It flirts with overtraining. The most vulnerable are novices, juniors, and seniors...For most riders, it's probably best to do no more than 4 consecutive days of such training before taking a much needed break... I call this method of closely spaced workouts over several days "crash training." That name is intended to imply a risk. You're likely to crash and burn by doing this. By that, I mean that all sorts of bad things are likely to happen, including overtraining. (pg 132-133)

So there you go. Not recommended by professionals. Good thing I don't care and generally enjoy myself on multi-day tours lasting 3 weeks.

In any case,  I found The Time Crunched Cyclist easy to use --- in fact, you can program the commuting workouts into your Garmin in very little time. Now performing those workouts are a different story. The power thresholds provided in the book are very narrow. There's a very good chance that while commuting you'll be much more worried about traffic lights, not crashing into errant drivers and pedestrians, and what not rather than staring at the power meter. Definitely something to watch out for. And of course there's no guarantee that the terrain will cooperate! You might find yourself descending just when the workout program calls for a power interval! I don't know how people deal with these structured programs. Even worse, on some weeks the program calls for a "rest day" where you're supposed to drive to work. Not an option for those of us who don't have cars!

I guess I just can't follow these programs. I'll just do what I do, which is to bike kids to school, bike to work, and bike everywhere I can, and just forget about optimizing performance. Nevertheless, the book is comprehensive, has a lot of programs that you can pick and choose from, and more importantly never over-promises. They point out at every step the limitations of the program (namely, you're expected to be able to do well in courses that take less than 3 hours to complete, and you won't be able to hold on to your fitness for more than 4 weeks before needing to back off and recover). Very honest and realistic!