We have touched on this in earlier articles; it is very much something you should have done by now or be in the process of doing.
I get my athletes to send through their seasons plans as it has a major role to play on how we plan your training as a coach.
You must put your races into A,B and C categories... A being your most important race/event of the year, so in XC it could be the National Championships or if you prefer the longer stuff, Cape Epic could be your 'A’ race. Already by mentioning these two events we have an April ‘A’ race and a July ‘A’ race, creating a big difference in the structure of your training! We always work backwards from an athlete's goal to set the seasons' training to make sure we spend the right amount of time in the correct phases of training.
It is natural to have more than one ‘A’ race in a season but it becomes a little more complicated to make sure you can hit several peaks. As a coach, we look to work with XC riders to maintain a peak race fitness for a period of the season however we would also look for a few ‘B’ races to allow some extra recovery within the season.
‘B’ meaning it's not as important as ‘A’ but you are still wanting to do well... The build up to a ‘B’ would therefore be less intense to allow some mental and physical rest.
When looking at ‘C’ races, we are talking out of season fun or just pre-season races that we are looking to see where our winter training has got us. For XC, these would not be regional or national events but local XC races. For endurance athletes we would be thinking Scott Series as training events for your 24hr or multi stage racing.
Get a calendar and sit down at the computer, get the dates for your races and then start filling in these dates to see what your season is looking like and how you can prioritize these.
Below we have an example of an XC racer's season on Training Peaks:
Below we have the season plan of a 24hr endurance rider:
If you want to find out more about planning a season then please do get in touch and we will happily discuss your coming season. contact@e3coach.com