Every move that you make- attacking- driving hard on the front- moving to the front on the outside of the bunch – being caught on the wrong side of the bunch during a cross wind etc etc eats in to your glycogen stores. Learning how to race effectively and efficiently through good race coaching and feedback will accelerate the learning process dramatically. Once you are extremely efficient in using the power you have you don’t actually need as much power to be able to perform better. The David and Goliath story isn’t a world away from what we are talking about here.

This seems incredibly obvious and for some riders this isn’t a problem. A lot of riders however do doubt their own ability. Why wouldn’t you? The average odds of winning any UK road race are approximately 80/1.

We help riders to develop this ability by occasionally going into races with particular goals to achieve during the race which don’t necessarily involving a result. In fact worrying about gaining a result- top five -top ten or twenty can seriously inhibit riding well and create a very reserved rider who always wishes they had done more in the race. We help the rider build confidences that they can race effectively, attack, have the confidence that they will able to recover in the bunch after efforts and not get dropped if they do get caught ready to go again.

This is quite possibly the most important part of racing at an amateur level. A lot of newer riders into the sport now only have an understanding of how to race from watching racing on TV. Domestic racing couldn’t be further from professional classics racing in terms of team riding. It isn’t about team orders, sitting on the front and driving into a cross wind, driving a race up a climb as a team. These are all romantic notions to see all of the team on the front but wholly inefficient and a guaranteed way of “burning all your matches” in the lower categories of racing.

 

Good tactical ability is about learning how the race reacts at what part or point during the race and understanding group mentality and psychology. The group of riders in a race almost become one living breathing body that thinks and feels very similarly. At numerous points during the race it will get hard and eventually it will snap and the break will go. If your one of the riders that attacked early on and made it hard- or made the attack just before the break went…then you’ve wasted some of your valuable power. A tactically savvy rider will make two hard efforts during a race. one to get in the break and one to win the sprint from the break. Some riders will say that certain riders are lucky and get in all the moves. There is no such thing as repetitive good luck in racing, these are all sound racing decisions made through good judgement and learning.