Last week Lauren De Crescenzo took a dominating victory during Stage 2 of the UCI Tour de Gila with a 60 mile solo breakaway.
Prior to the stage, her and the CINCH team created a strategy built around the wind. The wind was a huge factor in the stage as she faced massive winds and changing directions during the stage.
Her strategy, which resulted in a big win, can also help you beat the wind. Let’s have a look!
First you must identify which way is the wind coming from. The best way to do this is to listen to your wheels. Yes, this simple, but extremely affective method will work on all scenarios and help you to accurately pin point where the wind is coming from.
If you hear the sound of your tires on the pavement or ground, it is a tailwind. If you cannot hear you wheels and tires, instead the sound of the wind is in your ears, it is a headwind. Simple!
So it sounds like a headwind, now what do you do? The key to a headwind is you treat it like a climb. You want to think about keeping constant pressure on without dropping the pace. Just like a climb, if you drop the pace, it requires large amounts of effort to regain the same pace. This means to avoid surging and focus on a steady effort.
So it sounds like a tailwind, now what do you do? This one is all about raising the speed. You ride a tailwind much like a downhill, looking for all the places you can raise your speed and then doing the minimum after to hold the speed. So keep surging, raising power and the speed up, and then backing off the power. You will see the wind from behind will hold your speed allowing you to recover from the surge.
There you go! Use LDC’s strategy to win your rides!