Saturday, 12/11/2004 - Day before nationals..
With tomorrow being the big day, today was spent doing final preparation.
I threw some slicks on my cross ride and put in around an hour on the rollers, real low intensity, just loosening the legs up.
On the equipment front: I used to use wax based lubes on my road bike, but I stopped using them a few years ago, switching to wetter higher performance/maintenance lubes. This has left me with a few fairly large containers of old wax lubes just gathering dust in my closet. Well, for cross the wax lubes seem to work great. Between the racing and the cleaning necessary after each cross race I have to fully re-lube everything between races, so today the white lightning bottle came out one final time.
On the nutrition front: Today is the final day of my sodium phosphate loading. Hammer Nutrition produces a supplement, "Race Day Boost", which is basically branded sodium phosphate. When loaded right before "A races", sodium phosphate allows the body to buffer around an hour of lactic acid. The literature talks about 10% performance boosts on 40k time trials. Now, I wouldn't go that far, but if it’s safe and legal and positively impacts performance I'm all for it. For longer events, like say RAO, it would do very little other then giving a rider a little nicer start. The loading protocol is to take 1 teaspoon for times a day, for the four days leading up to the event. One important note on sodium phosphate is if its constantly used the body will cease to benefit from it’s, so it’s recommended that there be at least a month between loading cycles. In my case, I only use it 2 -3 times a year and only for my "A+ races".
I mixed up the beverages I'm going to take with me tomorrow to drink before and after the race. I'm going to take one bottle of Cyctomax (tropical fruit, one scoup), one bottle of Heed (mandarin orange, one scoup), and one bottle of Perpetuem (one scoup). I have just started using Heed and really like it, its even less syrupy then Cytomax and goes down a little easier right before intense efforts. I'm not sure I will use the Perpetuem, but it will be nice to have incase I get any hunger pains..
I threw some slicks on my cross ride and put in around an hour on the rollers, real low intensity, just loosening the legs up.
On the equipment front: I used to use wax based lubes on my road bike, but I stopped using them a few years ago, switching to wetter higher performance/maintenance lubes. This has left me with a few fairly large containers of old wax lubes just gathering dust in my closet. Well, for cross the wax lubes seem to work great. Between the racing and the cleaning necessary after each cross race I have to fully re-lube everything between races, so today the white lightning bottle came out one final time.
On the nutrition front: Today is the final day of my sodium phosphate loading. Hammer Nutrition produces a supplement, "Race Day Boost", which is basically branded sodium phosphate. When loaded right before "A races", sodium phosphate allows the body to buffer around an hour of lactic acid. The literature talks about 10% performance boosts on 40k time trials. Now, I wouldn't go that far, but if it’s safe and legal and positively impacts performance I'm all for it. For longer events, like say RAO, it would do very little other then giving a rider a little nicer start. The loading protocol is to take 1 teaspoon for times a day, for the four days leading up to the event. One important note on sodium phosphate is if its constantly used the body will cease to benefit from it’s, so it’s recommended that there be at least a month between loading cycles. In my case, I only use it 2 -3 times a year and only for my "A+ races".
I mixed up the beverages I'm going to take with me tomorrow to drink before and after the race. I'm going to take one bottle of Cyctomax (tropical fruit, one scoup), one bottle of Heed (mandarin orange, one scoup), and one bottle of Perpetuem (one scoup). I have just started using Heed and really like it, its even less syrupy then Cytomax and goes down a little easier right before intense efforts. I'm not sure I will use the Perpetuem, but it will be nice to have incase I get any hunger pains..
Labels: Cyclocross
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