Have You Noticed?
From the beginning, I have stated that the main purpose of this site
is to provide you with the information needed to help you better
enjoy cycling. We were taught in coaching over 35 years ago that
people enjoy a sport in direct proportion to their knowledge of the
sport. The better you understand the sport, the more you enjoy it.
Also, I have learned from experience and statistics that better than
90% of the new racers who come into the sport quit within one year.
I have found that the primary reason for this is that you don’t have
access to the information required to help you improve, be
competitive, and enjoy the sport. Most of you try the sport, can’t
advance, get frustrated, and give up.
Therefore, in order to try to keep more of you in the sport longer,
I spent four and a half years writing the materials on my site and
turning it into an ebook, “A Better Way To Train,” to also get a
little financial return for all that time and work involved largely
because, even though I decided to retire from coaching, I still have
bills and can use the money. I am not getting rich from this.
I added the Daily Tactical Tour Analysis in the first year because
of questions from you and to help you learn. I intentionally limited
the gathering of my information from just the news flashes to show
you how well you can do at understanding, following, and predicting
the racing action with such little information. Last year, I got my
first batch of bad information and considered obtaining a second
source of information but found that most of you are intelligent
enough to realize that my rare bad reads were strictly due to the
limited bad information.
We have had quite a bit of fun and I have managed to tick a few
people off because they didn’t like hearing the truth about certain
things. Tough, they better not go pro because they will quickly find
that I did tell the truth. If you are considering going pro, you
need to know before you spend all that time and money getting there
that there are some things you may not like about life in the
peloton. You need to be informed when making the decision to try to
make it as a pro so I tell the truth you won’t hear about in the
magazines or on TV.
I don’t know if any of you have realized that what I have been doing
strategically and tactically is exactly the same thing I would be
doing with you if you were on my pro team in the Tour. As a coach, I
would make a tactical analysis of the course, race format, teams,
and my team. I would use all of that to develop a basic team
strategy and make modifications based on the daily action and
standings in the stage race while working to anticipate the
strategies and tactics of the other coaches along with teaching you
ways you could beat or take advantage of those tactics. I guess you
could say that I have been coaching you through the Tour for five
years now and it has been fun.
It is interesting that, until last year, as far as I know, I was the
only site that was doing a daily tactical analysis for the Tour.
Last year, a number of you told me there were half a dozen other
sites trying to do the same thing. I don’t know if those sites are
still doing it because I have not heard from you about them this
year. I heard from you that most of them were not doing as well as
me and I figured that most of the people who tried to do it found
out how hard it is to write a daily tactical analysis and probably
quit. I am usually brain dead for at least two to three hours after
writing each analysis. I find myself having difficulty finding the
space between the walls. It is a lot tougher than you think
and really hard and very discouraging when the TDF site gives me bad
information.
But, in looking back over everything, I don’t feel that bad about a
few mistakes because most of the other retired coaches and pro’s who
have tried to do the same thing from the Tour in Europe had daily
access to the riders, coaches, race, course, and daily live coverage
and couldn’t do as well as I have been doing from thousands of miles
away with very limited information. I have even received some nice
complements from racers in Europe who can see the Tour every day
live, read about it in their papers, see it live on TV, and even
have access to riders and coaches that they can’t wait until the end
of the day to read my tactical analysis which is written from
thousands of miles away. I think I have proved to most of you that I
am very knowledgeable about the strategies and tactics required to
coach the Tour.
Since I first started this site over 5.5 years ago, I and some of my
readers have been noticing some interesting coincidences and I have
decided to share a few of these with you. Many of you have probably
also noticed at least a few of these.
Before we begin, you beginners have to understand that, at the top
of cycling, the world is very small. If one person in the upper
cycling industry becomes aware of something, the rest are aware of
it within months to at most a year. A few years ago, two different
pro’s on different top pro teams in the US both emailed me and told
me that they, all their teammates, and their coaches were reading
my site on a daily basis. If any of the top pro’s in the US knew
about this site, all of the other US based pro’s quickly found out
about it because the cycling grape vine is surprisingly fast and
efficient. If the US based pro’s (including Europeans) knew about
it, their friends in Europe found out about it within months.
Also, I have noticed, been told by numerous of my readers, and seen
it written on other sites that this site is easily one of the top
ten to twenty cycling sites on the Internet. This means that
everyone who is anyone in the cycling industry knows about this
site.
When I first began my daily tactical analysis of the Tour de France,
I stated that part of the reason for this exercise was to teach you
how to reasonably anticipate and predict the strategies and tactics
of your competition. The next day, I was cruising around the TDF
site looking for writing ideas and decided to see what Chris
Carmichael was doing for his comments page. I was startled by a
sharp statement which was not related to any particular comment on
that site and stated that no one could predict other coach’s
tactics. I thought this unusual and it seemed to be pointed at my
previous comment.
The unusual part is that, in my training, I was taught that, just a
like a chess player, one of the most important jobs for the coach is
to anticipate and predict the moves your opponent will make and I
have watched thousands of coaches do this for decades. Yet here was
a coach saying it couldn’t be done.
Over the years, in order to teach, I have gotten tough on the
coaches and riders in the Tour showing their mistakes and what
should or could be done. I have received some criticism from a few
of you but I have also watched some interesting coincidences follow
my comments and some of you have pointed out some of these to me.
For example, I got really tough on Coach Saiz of the ONCE team for
missed opportunities in not using team leverage in a few Tours but
did you see him very effectively use those team leverage tactics in
the Tour last year with Beloki and Azevedo?
I have seen changes at the TDF site along the lines of my comments
and even in the formatting of the Tour. One of these being the new
rules for the team time trial following several years of me teaching
you how weaker teams were eliminating top riders from the race for
GC because of big loses in the team time trial.
Then last year my analysis showed that USP couldn’t survive the
mountains using their traditional strategy. They not only tried to
use it but started using it earlier as if in defiance of my
analysis. After a few days, they were starting to lose control and
you could see that their team was starting to struggle. Suddenly,
they changed to a squad strategy similar to what I teach in my
ebook. When that was not working well enough, they changed to my
team leverage strategy for the last few days just before the final
and most significant stage. You know, the strategy I said they
should have used. I hope you noticed (some of you did) that they
quickly changed back to their original strategy following the final
significant stage as if they were hoping no one had noticed the
changes.
Over a year and a half ago, I sent the material in my ebook to a
number of publishers, including Velonews, to be published as a book.
It would have been the first ever book covering bicycle racing
strategies and tactics for road racing. They all rejected the book
but, a year later, Velonews published and distributed Tom Prehn’s
book on racing strategies. I purchased a copy to check it out and it
is surprisingly similar to my book. It just has a lot less
information. It only has about 15% to 20% of the information in my
ebook , but costs $5 more than the regular price of my ebook.
Interestingly, I did a little research after checking out Prehn’s
book to see why they may have rejected my book. It seems that to put
everything in my ebook into printed books, they would have to print
at least five or six books and charge you at least $30 per book so
that it would cost you at least $150 to over $200 to get all the
information in my ebook in a printed form. If you think this is
exaggerated, check it out and your will find that almost all sports
how-to books only have from 8 to 12 chapters averaging about 10
chapters each and my ebook has 80 chapters. My ebook is broken down
into sections some of which have more information in that single
section than entire printed books costing more than my ebook.
It is only because of the new ebook technology that I can provide
you with so much information at such a low cost.
Last year, one of my coaching clients and a friend decided to
rebuild my site so it would be more professional looking. (He did a
really great job, didn’t he? Thanks, Mike.) He started out by
looking over other sports sites to get ideas and had me look at some
to let him know what I liked. One of the sites he sent me to was the
CTS site. While there, I saw a marketing ploy that gave me an idea
to write about in teaching you what to look for in coaching. A few
days after I posted the item, my friend told me to go back to the
CTS site because of an interesting change. They had made a change to
the marketing on the site in direct response to what I had written.
We thought that was quite a coincidence so we decided to run a
little test. Every few days, I would visit the CTS site to find
something to write about, I would write the item and post it, and
then one or two days later we would go back to the site. 100% of the
time changes were made reflecting what I had written. Some of you
probably noticed some of the items and even barbs on my old site
aimed at CTS. All along, we were checking to see if Carmichael and
his marketing firm were reading our site. We got to having a little
too much fun with this new found game and spent a few months playing
with the CTS marketing firm until we got bored along with being too
busy with my new site and ebook and quit. Hey, you have to have fun.
:-) It was also interesting to note that during this time, the
concept that I and only I was teaching about the idea of “no pain,
no gain” not being true suddenly showed up as a marketing strategy
on the CTS site.
Then I pointed out that Lance was overtrained last year and would
have extreme trouble in the Tour. He struggled like crazy with
everyone noticing. The excuse that Carmichael gave the media
following the Tour was that Lance being off form was caused by him
getting older. I pointed out that was probably not true and, if it
were, Lance would be even more off form this year, which he is not.
Lance is riding stronger and faster than ever before.
Then I got a magazine from Velonews a few weeks ago. It is the “’04
Tour Guide” for the Tour de France. Inside it is an article about
Chris Carmichael telling about the new program he has put Lance on.
(Hold it, if Lance was not overtrained, why does he need a new
program? :-)) I want to share a few paragraphs of that article here
but before you read it, just remember how I have always emphasized
decreasing quantity and increasing quality along with using very
advanced rest cycles to maximize the effect of your quantity or
intensity parts of your program. This material is taken from the
Velonews “04 Tour Guide” for the Tour de France and the article
begins on page 71 and runs through page 73.
Quoting Carmichael: “When you’re looking into every possibility to
find ways to make progress, you can’t forget that being more
efficient makes room for additional work. Lance doesn’t ride for six
hours if he can accomplish the day’s goal in four. Staying on the
bike longer doesn’t always lead to improved performance, and Lance
has the confidence in his judgment and in mine to resist the
temptation to put in “just one more interval” or “just one more
hour.”
“Being more frugal in his training hours and efforts ensures that
Lance gets the recovery he needs to make every hour and effort
count. Where we used to focus on achieving high quantity as well as
high quality, we’ve now shifted the balance to manage quantity in
order to absolutely maximize quality.”
Gee, that sounds just like what I have been teaching on this site
for over 5.5 years. He clearly states that, in his old program,
which caused Lance to overtrain, he emphasized quantity too much and
has changed to decreasing quantity and increasing quality. It is
made even more clear in the caption for the picture of Lance and
Carmichael on page 72 which says, “Carmichael and Armstrong have put
the emphasis on training quality rather than quantity.”
I guess I should be flattered that someone as talented as Chris
Carmichael would use even a small part of my program and knowledge
to succeed. I developed this training concept over 25 years ago when
absolutely everyone else was still focused on maximizing quantity.
It has been taught on this site for the 5.5+ years that this site
has been up. And Chris, if you’re reading my site, I’d like to take
this opportunity to thank you for proving my training strategy works
well enough to win the Tour, and make Lance as dominate as he was
this year.
November 30, 2004 Update
In the December 2004 issue of Cycle Sport America, Chris Carmichael
wrote an article telling about training during the winter without
using weights. This is an article from a man who really used
to preach and use weights a lot during the off season with his CTS
System before Lance overtrained and almost lost the Tour.
Those of you who have read my book have probably noticed that it
sounds a lot like the off season training I teach about how to keep
developing strength and speed during the winter without weights.
Gee, the more I read about Carmichaels new training system, the more
it sounds like what I have been teaching you for almost six years on
this site and in my ebook. :-) Hmmm, I am beginning to
wonder, does CTS now stands for Cantrell Training System?
The trouble is that, if you use the winter training system the way
Carmichael explains it, you will burn out in about May and be trash
for at least two months during the early summer. That will be
the two most important months for most of you, June and July.
You see, we have known for a long time that if you continue to train
hard on the bike during the winter, you will suffer both physical
and mental burnout by May. They found that this seems to be in
relation to a build up of certain enzymes in your system that
develop when doing intensity work. When those enzymes reach a
certain level in your blood, that is when you tend to burn out.
That is why they went to doing small gear work during the winter
with long slow miles with both freewheel and fixed gear bikes.
But this created a little problem because, when you decrease the
workload on the body, everything in the body will atrophy to that
new workload including bones, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments.
Because of this, if you go from doing small gear work all winter to
suddenly jumping on big gears in the spring, you tend to get
tendonitis and get to take a lot of time off for recovery losing
ground on your competition. This meant they had to spend at
least one to two months at the beginning of every season
reconditioning their bodies for big gear work and recovering their
speed and strength they lost during the winter or risk injury.
I found that you could do a little strength work during the winter
restricted to only three days per week and you would not only not
lose ground like the small gear people do, but you would actually
continue to develop speed and strength through the winter and would
end up ahead of people who had been ahead of your at the end of the
previous season. It also completely eliminated the risk of
tendonitis at the start of the season and the risk of burning out by
May. But this had to be very restricted and controlled without
being a structured program to prevent mental burnout. That is
why I developed the four quarters system I teach in my ebook.
My four quarters off season training system solves all of those
training problems and keeps you developing in all areas of fitness
through the winter without risk of burning out during the next
season. If Carmichael is using my winter training system and
doesn't follow it closely using my four quarters system, he runs the
risk of at least eventually overtraining Lance by May causing him to
be off form and possibly losing the Tour.
Again, I want to thank Chris for the complement of using my program
when his program overtrained Lance. Thanks. :-) If
my system is good enough for Carmichael and Armstrong, it is good
enough for you. But why get it second hand when you can get it
straight from the original designer who spent decades fine tuning
the system? Plus, I show you how to modify the system for your
training goals and fitness level. It works.
