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The Road to Leadville Part 2

Dave Wiens gives his thoughts and tips leading to this years Leadville 100 MTB Race.

by Dave Wiens

July 11, 2010 – Didn’t get out this morning until after the live Tour coverage. The mountain stages are so compelling. Bummer for Lance but the race up front was killer.

Today I did a Cioni Double consisting of what I call PHOS/Cross. A Cioni Double is named after former Italian mountain bike pro and perhaps still a pro road racer in Europe. We were teammates on Kona in the mid ‘90’s and he stayed here in Gunni for a spell. He would go out on the mountain bike for a few hours then switch over the road bike and get in some more, or vice versa. It’s also considered a Cioni Double if you simply do two different rides in one day. Yeah, I know, we’re easily entertained up here.

The PHOS/Cross workout is phosphate sprints on the road and, in this instance, pushing (literally!) my bike up nasty steep hills as preparation for Leadville. Phosphate sprints are 10 seconds as hard as you can go with three minutes of rest in between. I generally do them on the flats. I did 6 reps today and got great heart rates in the lower to mid 150’s. I use this workout as a cursory fitness/fatigue gauge.

HR’s like today usually mean I’m pretty well-rested and have decent fitness. I’ll work up to where I’m doing 8 reps but likely never more than that. I’ll do them once a week max; this is the second time I’ve done them this season. They are good for race day warm-ups, too, as they get you going but at just ten seconds, they’re not too hard. This workout is a Dave Smith workout. Dave Smith trained me one year and Susan for three years, including 1996 when she won the bronze at the Olympics.

After the phosphate sprints, I switched to my Rotwild Fully and plied the sage covered hills behind Western State College. Three different efforts simply pushing my bike up steep nasty powerline cuts and other unrideably steep doubletracks. This isn’t as important for Leadville as it was in the days of the Cobra. The Cobra was the section on the SuperHumanMag.com video that showed Lance and I pushing our bikes at the 2008 Leadville. Unfortunately, the BLM made them reveg the Cobra and build a sustainable singletrack around it. I loved that section.

I still like training to push my bike up hills, though. It makes you strong like bull. The entire ride took about 2 hours and I climbed a total of 2,000 feet.

I have a pretty busy week of work and Tuesday and Wednesday will be hit and miss as for training.

Tomorrow I want to be on my bike at 6am for 90 minutes of a tempo (steady zone three it might be called?) workout I call AMU. This is on the road bike on the flats and is the most torturous workout I do. 90 minutes isn’t too bad, though, but 2.5 to 3 hours is really tough and I hope to work up to that in the next few weeks.

Five full weeks of hard training until Leadville.