How To Leverage Late-Season Fitness For Big Gains

OVERVIEW
The end of the summer cycling season is the best time to leverage a season's worth of fitness and training without the pressure of upcoming goals. It's the time when you can go have epic adventures, work on performance limiters, go hunting for Strava PRs and KOM/QOMs, complete end-of-season performance tests, and much more. Coach Adam Pulford helps you decide whether to take a break (some people need it, others don't), and how to make the most of the days when the weather is still warm and there's still abundant daylight.

TOPICS COVERED

• What to do if you still have energy and motivation
• How to tell if you need time off instead of pushing through
• Examples of late-season training challenges and adventures

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RESOURCES

• Podcast: Different Types of Field Testing
• Training Limiters

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Welcome and Purpose of the Show
• 0:53 The Case for One More Push
• 2:03 Are You Fresh or Fried
• 2:52 Aligning Breaks with Seasons
• 4:16 Event Ideas and Fall Challenges
• 6:13 DIY Goals: Segments, Camps, Testing
• 8:23 Work Your Limiters Now
• 11:03 Wrap-Up and Calls to Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

From the team at CTS, this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches, and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now, on to our show. Maybe it's how to stay motivated in the off-season or how much one should recover before they start the base training phase. That's just as important as the in-season stuff. But for now, and for all my time-crunched athletes out there listening, my message is this. Keep going. Keep going for like three or four more weeks. Why? Because many of us have built up a ton of fitness over the summer, and we still have a few weeks left of good weather and abundant daylight. So you might as well use it. I'm Coach Adam Pulford, and this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, the show where we take bigger, complicated topics and all things endurance training and make them as simple as possible in short, actionable episodes. Today I'm going to encourage you to give yourself a good fall challenge now so you can take a break with confidence later when the cold and dark whispers of winter start creeping in. So, what kind of challenges am I talking about? What should you target? And how do you know if you should even keep pushing right now? Well, let's dive in. First, if you're still fresh, I say keep pushing. I have many athletes who are still fresh mentally and physically, and they want they want a bit more before they take their break. But what is fresh? Fresh means you're motivated. You have good energy, you have no injuries from the season, legs aren't feeling like wooden pegs when you pedal your bike. Fresh is having good habits of sleep and fueling, good clean diet, and that has helped you hold up over the whole season. Fresh also means that mentally your job and your family workloads aren't crazy high and you have bandwidth for more training. Fresh is also when you're in good state of mind to take on more training. That's what I mean when uh asking yourself if you're fresh. Typically, I find more success with my time-crunched athletes by aligning their off-season with seasonal patterns or holidays versus just a competitive calendar. This is because training and recovery time is limited. And keeping the volume up year-round is the most important. Keeping volume up until the daylight diminishes and cold weather becomes a good natural time for this break, which is normally like early uh to mid-November. Then we get back to good habits just before Thanksgiving, which is late November, and then shorter, but normal frequency workouts during December during the December holidays, that's good so that we don't fall off the cliff. That's where I use a mix of intensities in different like virtual training platforms like Swift or TP Virtual to keep the motivation high and keep those habits rolling through the new year. Now, I do have athletes who have finished off the season with big A races of the season, and they're taking a time off now. They're taking a break right now. And that's mind and body, and that's before we ramp up into the base season. For all of you in that boat, stay the course. You probably are higher volume athletes or likely had just a bigger race block and a lot more emotion that went into it. So you should take time off now so you don't burn out. No matter what the weather is, no matter how much daylight is out there, if you're burnt, take time off now. Even if your time crunched and you're listening to this and you say, Wow, I had a good season, I'm just like smoked right now. Yeah, go easy, take a break. But coming back to where I think most of you listening, where most of you are right now and likely experiencing is this. I feel good, I feel motivated, I'm not that tired, and the weather is awesome, and it's gonna be dark by the time you know work is over pretty soon. So this advice is for you. End of season races, fondos, or make your own self-challenge. These are what I encourage you to pursue when I say keep pushing. Find a new event that may be outside your comfort zone. Uh, it's more epic, maybe it's something new that you haven't done before, but treat it like a fun day on the bike, not any specific performance outcome. In a previous podcast, I interviewed one of my local masters athletes. His name was Camilo, and we talked about events like the Moco Epic and the Grand Fondue, which are uh just they're like that. They're epic, they're fun local events that uh a lot of us racers jump into and uh we, you know, we stop at aid stations. It's a huge day, six to eight hours of riding, but we have fun with it. Now, other races like the big and little sugar events are happening uh here in a couple weeks down in uh Bentonville, and they're great season finales for a lot of the athletes that that I coach. Little Sugar is the mountain bike race, and Big Sugar is a gravel race. They're put on by Lifetime Fitness, check them out. That the pros are hitting it, that's the end of the Lifetime Fitness series, and it's it's a big performance thing for them. A lot of my amateur athletes, they go for it, and that just caps off their season. Now, if there's no events in your area where you don't want to travel to some big race and spend a bunch of money, create your own. Straba hunting. Remember 2020 when this was like all we had and everybody was super into it? Yeah, do it again, right? Pick out a segment that you've always maybe wanted to do and go get that crown. Maybe you scout it out with a couple training rides, and then you train for it specifically, and then you just send it. That's a really good way to have a little performance target, uh, go fast, go hard, and have a good end of season sort of cap off as well. You can also have a big mileage weekend. So lots of time crunched athletes don't have the luxury of volume. But if you plan ahead, you make your own mini camp with friends, or you go solo or bring the family along and you just communicate that this is, you know, you're gonna spend a lot of time on the bike, and you have a long weekend of riding in the hills, maybe you catch some of the last fall foliage in your area, it's a perfect way to do it. Now, the other self-challenge is performance testing. This is for the real data nerd that that's out there and honestly where the coach gets really excited, or at least I do. So after a big road season, if I have an athlete that's not going into uh cycle cross season or have any specific, you know, fall events or something like that, I usually do a volume block mid-September through October. Then I freshen up and then I test. The testing format that I like that I've talked about on this podcast before is uh testing a 20-minute max effort, five-minute max effort, one-minute max effort, and then some max effort sprints. And I do that all in the same week, usually three separate days, but kind of spread out between uh five days. So I have some easy days uh chunked in the middle of that. If you want more specifics on how to do this or any other field test, check out episode number 238. I'll link to it in my show notes, but I talk about all different kinds of field testing, how and when to do it, and doing it at the end of the season is a is a it's a great fit, in my opinion. The main point here is to cap off the season properly with a big thing or a benchmark, and you bring contrast to the seasons. And I find that this sets the mood right for taking some time away from the bike in order to detrain and transition into the next phase. Finally, do you have a limiter that you normally don't train? Now could be a good time to work on it before you take a break or transition into the off-season. Limiters are weaknesses that can hold you back from a top performance or winning a race or achieving your goal. It's something that you're not good at, and likely you don't train a lot because you're not good at it. We all do it. For example, if if you're a sprinter that struggles with uh long climbs or longer volume rides and you're you're cramping up toward the end, uh, and then that's holding you back, focus on that now. Put in a batch of volume. Maybe you do long rides, long hilly rides, zone three to four work, and then you rattle off some sprints at the end of that. Maybe you try an hour of power at maximum. Now, this super sucks, but I have my athletes do that at various times. It's both like now, if we need to work on it, as well as um like February, uh working on extensive threshold development or extensive aerobic power to increase durability and build aerobic capacity. No one really likes it, but you get really good. On the other side of the coin, if you're a climber and maybe you struggle with sprinting or anaerobic work, do that now. Go ride your bike and work on work in four to five sprints, uh, like two to three times per week. I don't think you have to make it more complicated than that. Sprint, try to see maximum power as as much as you can. 10 to 20 seconds is what I would suggest. And uh that's a good sprint workout. Just get good at sprinting. And typically when I have a climber do this for the first time, they're like, whoa, you know, they they're they feel like they're all over the place uh with coordination. It feels strange, but work on it now and you'll improve over time. You can also do some FRC work or increase your anaerobic capacity. Uh a good workout is something like five by one minute maximum effort. So full tilt, burn the ships, don't look back every one minute, and you have uh full recovery in between usually five to eight minutes, maybe up to ten minutes if you need it, and that's just like easy spinning in between, and you do that on a 90-minute ride. That'd be a good FRC workout, which again would increase anaerobic capacity. If you're more of an aerobic person, doing some of this limiter work now is good. Okay. Now a good plan now, a good plan works on your limiters further out from a competitive phase so that they hurt you less when the time comes to race or uh do your event. Of course, a good plan will forecast time to take a break, but this little window that we have here in North America and much of the northern hemisphere is a good time period to experiment with different training like this, working on the limiters. Many coaches will have you work on some limiters in the offseason, but the fall can be a good time too because we don't have A races, we don't have specific goals, and we have uh kind of like a you know a blank canvas to experiment with. I sometimes have a round of this limiter work before hitting it again in the base phase so that it keeps becoming less and less of a limiter. It may never be a strength, but it will limit you less in the long run, and this is the goal, if you keep on working at it. So to wrap this thing up, my advice is to do an inventory check of yourself. If you're fresh, keep pushing yourself. If you're taking some downtime now, stay the course. If this is the first time you've thought about strengthening your limiters, do so now with very little downside and a lot of upside. And all of this push in the next three to four weeks can help you keep building to be your best in 2026. That's it. That's our show for today. Always remember you can ask any question that you may have by heading over to trainwrite.com backslash podcast and click on ask a training question. Fill out that and send it over to me and my team, and we'll do our best to answer it on a future episode. If you liked what you heard today, I'm stoked. Feel free to write in and tell me about it. Or better yet, share this uh episode with a friend or a training partner. That's the best way to keep growing the show and ensure that you keep getting podcasts like this that helps you improve your training, performance, and fitness. Be sure to come back next week for more Time Crunch tips and short, actionable episodes. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainwright.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.