Racing as training or training for racing?

No doubt we can do ourselves more damage during competition than training but the first question is whether we’re able to recover from that and benefit from it.

There is a lot of suggestion that we should be training at the lowest intensity that promotes the kind of physiological adaptations desired, but no higher, because then recovery is as fast as possible. In this way many sessions of “sub maximal“ efforts may be more doable, and more beneficial, than one or two very hard efforts a week.

Second question is whether we do the right kind of damage. Racing repeatedly at time trial pace, and no higher for reasons of pacing may not be the most suitable training. VO2max intervals are done at up to 120% of time trial pace, they can be massively beneficial to your time trial speed, but it is impossible to train that intensity within a time trial effort, in fact I would think that most people only get near VO2max during the final couple of minutes whenb they push for the line.

From personal experience this year I found that in a period of several weeks riding time trials twice a week, I did not really improve. I was really hurting myself every ride, but just did not get faster. Then when I started doing 3 training sessions a week at slightly lower intensities, I did improve.

I do think that racing yourself fit is a viable strategy, but racing means road races, where intensity chops and changes, and you can to some extent pick the level of effort you want to put in. Only time trialling as a means of training may work for some, but it didn’t do it for me once I had accustomed to riding at a high threshold.