This week's tip:

What How Not To Burn Out In a Race

By Eddy Matzger

A competitor asked me recently how I could attack so many times in a race and not bonk. He was afraid if he did the same the pack would just go flying by him when they caught up. I had a few suggestions for him:

Enter Intervalia!

Plan more surges into your skate workout. If you can do your intervals from your normal cruising speed or slightly faster, your body will adapt to this new level of effort and recovery, so come race day, it won't be a foreign experience. In Thailand, I would try to surge about twenty times during a three hour skate (think NYC 100K), or about 8 in an hour if I was thinking Northshore, and time my surge to begin before a faster moving vehicle came by. When it passed, I would then try to jump into its draft and catch it in the hopes of getting pulled along a long way. 9 times out of 10 I couldn't, but my body knew how to resume skating at close to race pace even after nearly blowing my wad. If I did catch on to the vehicle, getting sucked along at top speed in the vortex is easy, and not the "speed" part of the training. The speed part was sprinting to catch on.

Whoah, Leadfoot!

When the pack picks up the pace, people start running their skates to accelerate like it's a start for pole position. Unless you practice starts a whole lot and your body can respond repeatedly without complete rest, you'll burn out your fast twitch muscles. In outdoor skating, this sort of rapid acceleration is usually not necessary unless it's in the closing kilometers. So during a race, if I'm towards the back of the pack and the pace suddenly jumps up front, I won't wait for the traffic ripple effect to reach me, but rather step out of the line and start slowly accelerating, evenly and smoothly, so that when the guys I was running with finally make it up to me at speed, I can easily slot back in to a comfortable position in the draft.

Skate Solo!

As exciting as all the vehicular drafting that I did in Thailand last two months was (tip: to draft a truck, get on it as it pulls out of the weigh station!), the majority of my miles were done alone, hands behind my back, pushing the wind all by myself. Just me and the road. No "cheating" in the draft of another. This is also crucial to your training because at a certain point, a race where you go for the jugular can become a time trial, where everybody pushes along at their own maximum speed. It can hurt more to go a little slower with other skaters than to push harder and find your own maintainable threshold speed. The only way to find that speed is by yourself, and it will make you strong. When you're strong, there's no way the pack can fly by you after one of your wicked surges. Happy surgin'!
 

 

Eddy Matzger is one of the winningest skaters in the history of inline racing and leader of the popular Eddy Matzger SkateFarm and Roadshows. He makes his home in Floyd, VA, site of the Skate Farm. When he's not skating in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains, he's traveling around the globe, where he's in high demand as a teacher and coach. His longtime sponsor is Twincam bearings.

 

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