Here are four tips within our CINCH Four Pillars to improve your time trials and or your solo PR efforts.
Riding or racing to beat the clock by yourself is not all about power. As a small climber who focused on stage races, I had to learn to become a good time trialist.
Now I use these tips to coach many athletes to success.
1. FOCUS: “Start fast, finish faster.” Yes, it’s simple but thinking this way works. You need to mentally be ready to go out hard, but prepared to increase the perceived effort in the second half. Power wise, this ends up being an even effort, but physically it feels like you are going much harder in the end.
2. FITNESS: Think of your TT effort in three parts. In the start, you use your explosive zones for one minute to get the speed up as quickly as possible. Then in the meat of the TT, you settle into a rhythm. Here you alternate between your three threshold zones, grabbing momentum with the upper ones, and then holding that soles with the lower ones. Finally, in the finish, you go ALL IN going into the explosive zones leaving nothing left on the table. This is in the last eight minutes of the effort.
3. EXECUTION: Shift, shift, shift! Shift like you are a Formula one driver. Change your cadence using high cadence to gain speed and low cadence to maintain speed. Your shifting needs to be on point so that you always have full chain tension, no matter the effort.
4. NUTRITION: Make sure you FINISH your high carb meal three hours before your effort. This meal is critical to getting the most out of your effort by having topped off glycogen storages. On the bike, if the effort is one hour or more make sure you eat something high-carb every 30 mins.