'Monday will be a whole new me': How not to stick to a training plan

It seems incredible that in a long racing career no one ever asked me to do one of those “My Week in Training” features. It’s not as if my career was a total disaster – I fluked a few wins here and there. It’s not as if I didn’t train. It’s not as if no one had my phone number. It’s not as if I’d said no to such a request – it would have been a valuable opportunity to spread disinformation to my rivals. (“I spend an hour every day on the rollers pedalling backwards,” was a decoy I always planned to deploy.)

Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine. 

So anyway, better late than never, I thought. Here’s the training that I did last week, in an important pre-season training block. I have no particular long term or short term racing targets, and the weather wasn’t great.

Monday: Couldn’t be bothered. I woke up with some vague notion of “new-week; new-me” in my head, but it ran into the sand around the tail end of breakfast. So I compromised by still taking the two hours off work that I’d have used to go cycling, and making a Victoria sponge instead. It was all right, but I need more baking training.

Tuesday: Two hours, with forty minutes of tempo effort in the second hour. It went pretty well, although I didn’t actually do the tempo effort because I thought that might spoil the ride, which up to that point had been very pleasant.

Wednesday: Cleaned and lubed my bike. Then I tried to decide if cleaning a bike ought to count as training, on the basis that it takes up time I could spend doing something more useful, and ultimately it ought to make me faster. That sounds like training to me, but it does rather fly in the face of tradition. In the end I thought, “why not,” and entered it on my TrainingPeaks account.

I rode the Cycling Weekly Zwift time trial, and won, but was still a bit disappointed not to win by more. I reflected that if I wanted to go faster maybe I ought to train a bit harder. Then I tried to forget about this idea.

Thursday: One of the strangest features of the TrainingPeaks website, used by people like me to keep track of training, is that you can edit it. Rather than being limited to things that you can actually prove with GPS, like that global snitch Strava, you can retrospectively alter or even just invent any session you like.. On this particular Thursday I did 90 minutes, with three eight-minute threshold efforts. I defy you to prove otherwise.

Friday: A planned rest-day, and you can take it as read that if a rest-day is planned, a rest-day will be flawlessly executed. My compliance to my training schedule is patchy, but not when it’s a day off. But it wasn’t all lazing around; after reading an article about the benefits of weight training, I decided I ought to start going to the gym again sometime.

Saturday: A three-hour ride, on my time trial bike, which is probably why my back hurt in the evening. Under the circumstances the training score that TrainingPeaks gave me seemed a bit on the mean side, so I edited another 20% onto it. Later I contemplated splitting a bottle of wine with Mrs. Doc over dinner, but didn’t, and reckoned that this act of self-denial was worth another 10%.

Sunday: An easy four hours with a friend. It was supposed to be five, but, well, there was a herd of deer standing in a field staring at us. It was a bit unsettling and we needed a longer than usual café stop to recover from it. I probably shouldn’t have counted the time in the café in my riding total for the week but, well, I did.

Still, I told myself, Monday will be a whole new me.