Training

You should give your age. 12 is much different than 16.

Perhaps your father has friends who he would trust you to ride with. Perhaps you could find a route your father thinks is safe enough for you to ride on.

---

When I was 16 I would do a 50 mile ride from time to time. Looking back, my road skills were not what they should have been.

You need to shame your dad into getting faster 😉

In your early teens, lack of body weight is your friend when going up hills. Respecting your parents requirements to stay on certain roads is pretty much a given. If you start wandering off onto other roads you may find your cycling time curtailed... Spice things up by doing your route in different directions and having rides that have different "themes" - hill sprints, sprints on the flats (for signposts), all out hill climbs (even turning around at the bottom of the descents to climb them again), kilo time trials to the same sign posts that you were sprinting too, using the descents to specifically practice cornering (something your former pro friend can help you with) etc. There's a million and one ways to change things up.

Power is power. It doesn't really matter if you put out 300 watts on a hill or 300 watts on a set of rollers for a given interval. For the most part it's the work that counts... Your lack of bodyweight will mean that for a given power output you'll slay all and sundry. Paris Hilton probably once desired to be as light as you probably are...

Keep it fun and see if there are any local races that you can enter. There will be a time where your training and talents can be used - you just need to keep riding until that time.

See if you can ask your Pro friend to give you specific cornering and circuit racing lessons. When I was 17 my coach did that with me with some of his former riders that were Pro and it's held me in good stead ever since... but be prepared to feel very uncomfortable and work on the premise that if they can make it around the corner then you can. There are words that I need to use to describe the thoughts that were going through my head on the first 100 or so corners that I can't type if under 16 year olds are reading. That was a very tiring 6 hour session from hell. All of the four letter 'bad' words were thought... [IMG]/img/vbsmilies/smilies/ROTF.gif[/IMG]

Thanks for the feedback! I am 15 years old and weigh around 140, so weight is an advantage for me while climbing. I also do, and in previous years, many hill sprints. I can out climb my NYS champion friend and a lot of other people in my age group, because I do a lot of climbing. I've done a century before and do metrics almost every week, so I ride quite a bit. The friends that we ride with later in the season peak at where my Dad is now, accept for the pro, and I try to ride with him as much as I can. I live on a 1/3 mile development loop and my Dad is a crit. master and has been helping me on the corners, but some of our friends live on very windy and twisty roads, so I will see about riding them with our pro friend. I do a lot of roller work, because I am on them constantly, and do my training schedule on them. Our pro told me that I should do the intervals on the road for a greater benefit, and I will make more time to do those on the road. I will ask for a cornering and circuit schedule because the last race I did I was forced to chase down the pack on a crit. course after every corner and I lost more and more time, it was a 40 lap race, and the officials didn't want me to crash so they pulled me out, I was the only Jr. I am decent on cornering, but have little confidence and get nervous that I will crash, because it wouldn't be the first time. Thanks for the tips, I will definitely incorporate them into my ride, which I will be able to do in 2 days, after tennis season is over. That's another reason why I had to ride inside, tennis games and long practices. Getting home at 7 or later and by the time I had gotten ready for a ride it was too dark to ride for 2 or more hours. Due to the fact that you guys have been so helpful do you have any tips on descending and TT after a break, like I would do after a hill.
Thanks,
Spencer