Cat 3 training?

ryan16 said:

Hey guys I am just wondering what type of training do you cat 3 riders do? What would a typical week look like? With in the next year or two I would really like to be a really strong cat 3 and when I say strong I mean strong. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I've seen some of these guys training logs and it's 15-20 hours a week on the bike. Hate to see what it would take to be competitive in the P12 ranks.

Well, it's been a few years since I was a serious racer, but I doubt the training schedules have changed all that much. It was 60 miles x 5 days/wk, rolling terrain, charge all the hills for high-intensity efforts, avg. speed 20-22mph; 1 day off; 1 race ea. weekend 60-120 miles; if no race nearby, then 100-120 miles w/ lots of climbing. Before big races (e.g., states), 80 miles x 5 days/wk for ~1 month.

Well, there are two approaches.

One is the shotgun approach where you basically do a lot of races, training races, and group rides and everything else under the sun. Somewhere in there, you get the requisite training. Basically, pro miles but cat 3 results.

The other approach is to just do the stuff that matters and train half as much with the same results or better.

I'd say that if you can't do 4.25 W/kg for 20-30 min at sea level and you've been training >10-12 hrs/week or >4,000 mi/yr for 1-2 seasons, you need to seriously reassess your training or get a VO2max test (because you might have the world's lowest VO2max--something's holding you back, if not your training).

ryan16 said:

Hey guys I am just wondering what type of training do you cat 3 riders do? What would a typical week look like? With in the next year or two I would really like to be a really strong cat 3 and when I say strong I mean strong. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Well if you want to be strong like me and drop cat 5 riders with a few turns of the crank 😉 you need to follow my highly dedicated training plan:
Tuesday and Thursday nights I ride for 2.5 hours on a training race ending up with about 90km and a avg speed around 40+km/hr (not including warm up and cool down). I may ride easy on Wednesday night but usually don't... If I race on the weekend I will do it and then an easy day (either before the race or after depending), if not I do a 120km ride hard one day and a slighlty less long ride the other(preferablely after the hang over ends)... Of course this gets me in condition to try and remain pack fodder at a Cat 3 level without getting dropped so strong is reletive I guess. As long as you are training hard, and getting enough rest you will be 95% as fit as the guy that devotes his life outside work to training. Since I don't get paid to ride my bike it seems like a much better deal to reach 95% of your potential with 40% of the effort.

When I was winning cat-3 races, I didn't have much time to train since I was a senior at UCSB. Spent about 10-12 hours on the bike per week, which was mainly with the UCSB Cycling Team. I'd catch about 3 rides a week with them when my class-schedule allowed. The three most important days were;

- Tues: practice-crit at Research Park where a lot of the local riders would come, 60-80 people, so it was pretty much a full-field and it was fun because even the chics would get into it.
- Thurs: aerobic workouts, intervals and hill-climbing. I was working downtown, so I'd catch the team as they rode past and get in the longer intervals and hill-climbs
- Sun: endurance, catch the Bathhouse ride that started downtown, rode down past La Conchita to Ventura, then inland around Lake Casitas and through the hills back (60-80 miles total depending upon whether I rode from my house or drove there). This was another mass ride with ALL of the local riders coming out and there'd be 100-120 riders en-masse going down the highway along the beach. 🙂

These were the core rides and I'd get a good workout without trying. Also the practice with strategy in the pack and manuvering around was vitally important as the 3's races were always at full-speed and it was tough to win on fitness alone like you can do with the 4's and 5's races. The only other ride I'd do outside of these would be sprints with a small group from my team. We'd work on lead-outs and timing the distances. It's good to know exactly how many seconds and how many meters out you can start a 100% sprint on your own, and how far out you can do it with a lead-out. Knowing the optimum gears and RPMs you can use that gives the highest speed and when to shift is handy as well (imperative you have a computer that datalogs so you can analyze on a desktop PC later). I realized that I was pushing way too big a gear in the sprints and it was costing me precious meter or two here and there in the races. 🙁

Thanks everyone for your replys I really appreciate your time. I think I will start to put in about 15+ hrs a week and hopefully I can really improve over the next year.

One last question. If I am a Cat 5 now and I train like a Cat 3 and workout with Cat 3's about how long should it take for me to get to Cat 3?

Thanks

ryan16 said:

Thanks everyone for your replys I really appreciate your time. I think I will start to put in about 15+ hrs a week and hopefully I can really improve over the next year.

One last question. If I am a Cat 5 now and I train like a Cat 3 and workout with Cat 3's about how long should it take for me to get to Cat 3?

Thanks

Cat 5 to Cat 4 is automatic based on number of qualifying races entered (10, if I recall correctly). Cat 4 to Cat 3 is based on points accumulated based on finish position. It depends on how many races you enter and your finish position. It's rare to jump two categories in one season. See page 5 at this link. usacycling.org2005 USAC rulebook.pdfOpen ↗

Yeah, it's also up to the discretion of your district-rep as well. I went straight into 4's and skipped 5's altogether after my first season of collegiate racing. Won two races in the 4's in a month, petitioned the district-rep for an upgrade and did my first 3's race that same day.

ryan16 said:

One last question. If I am a Cat 5 now and I train like a Cat 3 and workout with Cat 3's about how long should it take for me to get to Cat 3?

One thing that is overlooked by this statement is that it is totally dependant on your potential. It is kinda like acedemia and studying. Some people can get good grades without studying at all and when/if they apply themselves they go on to do great things, some people can study very hard and fail. I know for myself if I trained my ass off, even if I didn't have a job and focused only on cycling, the best I could hope to be is a strong Cat 3 (maybe Cat2 pack fodder), with less training there are elite riders that can totally dust me, and I can spank some people that train much harder than myself with little effort. It is all reletive. Whether you are competitive or not depends on 3 things in simplistic terms: 1) your potential 2)development of your potential 3)your ranking relative to your competitors with respect to #'s1 and 2. Once you start racing more you will get a better idea of #3, if you are a strong Cat4 you will make it into Cat3. FWIW I enjoyed being a strong Cat 4 much more than being a nobody Cat3 but everyones goal is different.

This is my first year racing. Started out as Cat 5 in March, now I won 2 Cat 4 races and placed top 5 few times. So, technically, I can be a Cat 3. But I doubt that I would move up this year. There weren't much differences from Cat 5 to 4. But Cat. 3 seems like a different world. Also higher category races demands more team tactics.

ryan16 said:

Hey guys I am just wondering what type of training do you cat 3 riders do? What would a typical week look like? With in the next year or two I would really like to be a really strong cat 3 and when I say strong I mean strong. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

A strong, and I mean STRoNG, cat 3 is a cat 3 with enough points to upgrade to cat 2.

ryan16 said:

Thanks everyone for your replys I really appreciate your time. I think I will start to put in about 15+ hrs a week and hopefully I can really improve over the next year.

One last question. If I am a Cat 5 now and I train like a Cat 3 and workout with Cat 3's about how long should it take for me to get to Cat 3?

Thanks

The more races you do, the faster your chances of upgrading. If you only race 10-20x year, it may be tougher. I always tell anyone that is looking to upgrade, get as strong as you can, then go and race everything you can find. 50 races in a 12 month period gives you 50 chances for upgrade points. Even back of the packers may find themselves in winning moves on the right day, but they don't have a chance if they don't show up.

YMCA said:

The more races you do, the faster your chances of upgrading. If you only race 10-20x year, it may be tougher. I always tell anyone that is looking to upgrade, get as strong as you can, then go and race everything you can find. 50 races in a 12 month period gives you 50 chances for upgrade points. Even back of the packers may find themselves in winning moves on the right day, but they don't have a chance if they don't show up.

Yeah but this brings up the point to which I was eluding to earlier... if you aren't all that competitive in your current category, why upgrade to a harder one? Penis stretching only works for so long...

Then what? It falls off? That might actually be good, saves some weight! 😉

My first collegiate NCCA season, I did 14 race-weekends between mid-Feb. to end of May. Each meet would have crit, road-race, some sort of individual TT/hillclimb and some of them had a 4th even of a team TT. So I got in 46 races before summer.

Then did another 30 races in USCF between end of June to early Oct; sometimes they had to break up the 4's into two races because of the large number of entries, I'd do them both. Then there were two practice crit every single week, and if I hung the whole time with no free-laps, that'd be the same experience and workout as a race... so add another 50 to that total and I did about 126 races my first year... The next year I did the Casper Classic, boy was that fun! 🙂

DannoXYZ said:

Then what? It falls off? That might actually be good, saves some weight! 😉

Problem is the only guys that would see any noticable weight savings don't need to stretch it 😉 .

Really all I was saying is I don't really understand it, but some people seem to think that the bragging rights that go along with what category you race are more important than having fun racing. I have seen two guys that were mediocre at best Cat 3's that did all kinds of races to get enough points to become Cat 2... yeah they were Cat 2s but I lost touch with one, and the other never finished a race that I know of, and ended up quiting riding. Same thing happens with Mediocre Cat 4's that NEED to be 3's for no reason. My only point was don't lose perspective about why you race and end up leaving the sport after you become disillusioned to the fact that you won't go pro. Upgrade when you are winning races or consistantly placing... other wise it makes no sense.

I'm not sure what the cycling-culture in Brasil is like, but here in the U.S. there's a tonne of egomaniacs whose entire motivation in life appears to crush everyone around them. They seem to be insecure with themselves and somehow having "better" stuff, higher "worth" and better "performance" makes them feel better. Kinda like the "keeping up with the Jones" mentality on steroids. I hope it's strictly an American phenomenon.

Anyway, the best times I've had in bike-racing was with a bunch of friends from school. After our first collegiate season, 8 of us moved into together and formed our own fraternity of sorts. We'd live, eat, drink, slept bike-racing! Training was always easy and fun because there'd always be someone going out on a ride. Weekends were awesome as we'd keep up the road-trips going to races together and we'd have someone in every race from 4s up to 1-2-pro. It was great racing and training with a crew and the support was incredible. We became almost telepathic in our racing. No matter what the circumstances, when we needed to get something done like chase a break or set up for the finish, we'd all fall in and knew exactly what to do. The 1st two guys would be the leadouts, they'd knew precisely how far out they could start the sprints, the 2nd or 3rd guy was the one who'd take the finish depending upon how strong they were at the end of the straight. The 4th guy would soft-pedal a little and slow the pack around the last couple of corners, etc. It was like a script we'd make up in the moment. 🙂

Then people graduated and moved off and our team dwindled one by one. I tried recruiting new people but it just wasn't the same, they just weren't the bros. Then my asthma kicked in a couple years after graduation and I too dropped out. Racing by myself and fighting allergies just wasn't any fun and you can't do well without a team in the upper ranks.

That was 10-years ago... I've finally licked the asthma with some new medications. And I met some other folks who are into racing and aren't as egotistical as the older guys in the local clubs. So we might have a new team forming to have some real fun!🙂