The BC ones are a pretty good starting point.
For making your own, the place to start is always Friel’s training bible – he himself admits its not always the most modern thinking, but as a starting point you really cant go wrong there.

When making your own plan you really need to evaluate both the requirements of your event and your own personal strengths and weaknesses. Then plan sessions based on generating specific physiological changes. From a training perspective, if you do a session and cant say exactly why you are doing it, its a wasted session.

For your current training, how are you measuring intensity? Power, HRM or RPE?

I don’t search for them as such, i tend to stumble across them as i meet people or read training blogs.

Biggest problem isn’t finding events, its financing them. Getting across to europe for an event can easily run to £500-£1000 for a single day event, which is a bit crazy

Nope, base miles have never been debunked, endurance forms the basis of training for all endurance sports. More recent research into polarised training has shown the best way to train is with a very high volume of very low intensity.

There was actually a great interview with our female rowers at the olympics that no-one picked up on. Despite the fact their event is less than 10mins long their training regime was very very predictable – it was founded upon long slow rows day after day. Same applies to cycling, running etc etc.

Where the line becomes more blurred is for ‘time crunched’ athletes, but even then you can’t do nothing but intensity. Look round the internet and you’ll find plenty of stories of people hammering out sweetspot sessions day after day, and in some cases overtraining so badly they hadn’t recovered years later.

Going back to a traditional periodised approach, which i believe kryton is following with some slight tweaks to compensate for low volume – its about a steady build making training more and more race specific.

Taking skills aside, XC races are a blend of muscular endurance and anaerobic endurance, both of which are underpinned by good old fashioned slow mile munching endurance. The bigger the endurance base, the more potential you have to grow the muscular/anaerobic parts closer to spring.

What has been debunked (as there has never been any evidence) is that base should be exclusively low intensity and any intensity in that period will undo that work. Working on other fundamentals like force, pedalling economy and moderate muscular endurance sessions (tempo) during base makes very good sense.

Pro4 endurance/krylion was awesome, sadly Michelin have decided it was too popular and not made a direct replacement in the new tyre range.

I still reckon normal marathons are plenty, no need for plus.

Assuming the knee is 100% healed, the first thing you need to do is find an event you fancy and mark that as your target. Open ended training plans arent really a thing.

Once you’ve got the event and date, you can analyse the requirements and work backwards aiming to start adding intensity around 16-20 weeks before your event. Up until that point just stick to very light intensity (should be able to hold a conversation no problem), gradually building the duration. It might be a bit dull no start with, but avoiding injury and excess fatigue will allow you to train more regularly and consistently.

How serious are you about next year’s goals?

If the answer is very, then stay on plan – as a time crunched athlete you need to be making the best of every session, and each session should have a specific physiological goal.
You can guarantee there’ll be other people out there taking training very seriously.

On the other hand if next years goals aren’t that important, go for it as it’ll undoubtedly be fun (in a 40mins of agony) type of way.

My nose runs like a tap when i have a cold – suspect 2-3 times your volume.
2.5ml blow every 2 mins = 75ml/hr.
Probably only awake 12hrs a day though like that, so ~900ml/day
Yes, thats disgusting
Yes, I should buy shares in kleenex

Woolie boolies do come in a longer 6″ cuff length if you search for them. Prefer the regular 4″ cuff myself.

2/10

Its cold, damp and grey.
Despite the above i’d still rather be riding than at the office
No holiday allowance left for the year (bar 1 recovery day after relentless)
And i popped out at lunch to find seagulls have decimated my car…….

Deep joy 😥

A bit surprised sealant in the tube didn’t work – unless you inflated it with CO2 and immediately set the sealant?

Anyway refer to option 3b above.

Shaving weight and being tough aren’t things that usually go together.

If it was me i’d build stans crests on a hope SS hub

Airshot is good. Mine lives in the boot. Not infallible though – tried an x-king right out of the box and it didn’t go due to too many bead kinks. @Scotroutes offers good advice in this situation.

I’m not much of a fan of ‘maintaining’, although can see in some ways its essential when trying to race a season long series.

The problem with trying to cling on to form after peak1 is it just leaves you knackered mentally and physically from intense intervals and with a totally erroded base.

Had my best season this year by taking a week off after peak1 then going back to a month of z2 base rides and rebuilding to a peak2 around 12 weeks later.

Currently trying to ‘cling on’ to a little form from peak2 for relentless (only a minor objective this year) and then looking forward to most of November slacking off.

Following with interest.
I’ve a 2014 7.0 and wouldn’t mind some cost effective upgrades to put it on a bit of a diet.

Maybe depends what terrain you are riding.
For me i’ve had my trailblazers on mostly dry buff forest tracks and they’ve been great. Only roll a fraction slower than XC 29er tyres, but gobble up small roots and offer improbable levels of grip.

Running at 12-14psi i find they give quite a nice magic carpet feeling over small level chatter, but can pogo a bit on bigger hits.

Bear in mind we dont have access to b+ enduro tyres yet, so if you want to compare wait until the HR2 and minion arrive or run XC tyres on your 29er wheels.

As above, if your climbing is non tech fire road type stuff maybe ask about recractable dog lead towing – works for adventure racers.

Alternatively just tell him that riding off and leaving you is a total nobber move.

@angeldust, modern geo isn’t necessarily even desirable for an XC race bike, although there is certainly some scope for slightly slacker but still light hardtails for general purpose riding.

@wicki the canyon is on sale at £1050 at the moment. In my mind thats same price bracket as £899.

Wouldnt recommend a carve myself, found it heavy and about as stiff as an overcooked noodle when i test rode it.

Spec of the kona looks great for the money if buying new, not so much second hand. Dont know much about scandium as a frame material though.

Biggest trouble at your price point is finding a non-entry level fork

I’d be looking at lack of sleep or minor malnutrition as most likely culprits. Go see your GP though, thats what they are for.

Interesting that so many people find rest weeks hard. I usually find i’m really pretty tired by the end of a 3 week block and more than happy to have 5-7 days taking it easy.

Don’t know how you are struggling to find 29ers, theres about a million to choose from.

On the budget you’ve hinted at i’d be looking at the Grand Canyon CF 5.9

Who needs friends when you have a bike to ride?

Need to try again?

And first one of the year for me tonight.
I was reminded that it doesn’t matter how good your lights are, if there’s so much dew in the air you can’t see through glasses.

@mikewsmith – There is no need to make it more accessible at the top, as there clearly isn’t the talent progressing through from the bottom.

And thats more to do with the norms of society and behaviour of the average female than anything else. You can look at participation levels in pretty much any sport and find that males vastly outnumber females. We could speculate on any number of reasons why that is, but ultimately its irrelevant.

If you want to increase the quality and depth of a WC field, you need to increase the underlying pool of riders. If you can figure out a way to get 20-50 times more females to take up mountain biking, in 5-10 years you’ll have a large quality field.

At the moment however you’ve got the situation where we can see some of the better men get a rear flat in the first few turns, roll down waving to the crowd and post a time that would give a top 10 in the women’s field. And like that, its hardly surprising that rbtv don’t want to give them time on air, and sponsors don’t want to fork out supporting a rider that no-one even knows exists.

Magic, cheers.

Like i said, they did it wrong.

But if they are going to do it wrong, they’ve at least only cut out riders that are mincing down the hill cr@pping themselves and not really racing at all.

Bars will soften the ride, but not as well as extra bar tape or gel strips.
Wheels will more than likely make it worse.

Meh, they’ve done it wrong, they should have reduced/restricted the number of practice runs, it would have had a bigger impact.

That said, no-one will miss the bottom 25% of the womens field as their performances simply arent of a world class level.

@crashtestmonkey, actually closer to 3kg for the wheels crazy as that may seem. I’d probably opt for a set of the cosines from wiggle for a cheap but significant saving.

Not sure about current model, but the 2014 boardman is great.
As @Digger90 pointed out, at that price point wheels are heavy. Don’t think i’d even consider racing my boardman without a wheel upgrade.

I’ve got an old gore active shell one with a mesh back, would highly recommend except they dont make them any more.

Cable ends
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/goodridge-gear-cable-end-cap/rp-prod23400

A somewhat dated Steve Peat book
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/steve-peat-world-champion-17-years-in-the-making/rp-prod58838

Yeah, CTD is a bit pants, its more D/D+/DMax.
Or bump up the air pressure big time and you get C/T-/T
Being efficient for climbing and using full travel descending seem mutually exclusive.

Not really all that excited to be honest.
7hr race of which the last 7mins may be interesting.

Question 3: Is stravas zone calculation a bit funky?

This.

Obviously you need to do a test to find out where your LTHR is.
I also have an MHR of 187, and my LTHR is at 172, so i’ve got z5 in strava set as 173+.
Basically I map the first 4 zones to Friels first 4 zones and condense his 5a-5c into strava’s z5

I’m wearing a onesie made of printouts of this weeks STW threads about clothing for autumn/winter.
Plenty warm and windproof, but chafes a bit and doesn’t breath very well.

I kid you not, its horrendous.
Doesn’t go, doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn (except of its own accord over uneven surfaces). Its noisy, has no steering feedback, height and pitch of seat not adjustable, steering wheel not adjustable. Combination of tiny wheels and useless suspension seem to magnify every bump.

I’d go as far as saying anyone that test drives one and still buys it needs their licence taking away.

Not quite the same, but i have a dacia sandero as a courtesy car today.
15 min journey took about 18mins, but felt like 18hours.