Coach Carter

This weekend saw the hottest day of the year so far: it has to happen each season, coming across a hot day for a race event - but what made this weekend so tricky for a group of my athletes was that it came out of the blue, and also on one of the biggest weekends of their season.

It was bad enough watching - as I stood on the dual carriageway in Warwickshire, the venue for this year's opening time trial championships of the year, the National 10 mile champs, it was 33 degrees. The same thing happened last year - but this year I was prepared: sun cream and not wearing my sandles (my athletes will remember my purple, burnt feet last year!). I got the impression though that many of the athletes competing hadn't learnt the lessons of last year...

The sport science literature is packed with research investigating the impact of heat on performance. Exercise in the heat results in major alterations in the body's circulatory, thermoregulatory and metabolic function. During races, the body's metabolic rate is already high - the exercise itself producing a lot of heat that needs removing from the system (or the muscle contraction will be compromised). Add high environmental temperatures, and the problem is worsened. In an attempt to keep itself cool, the body intiates an increased rate of sweat production. This helps to limit the rise in core temperature, and can prolong the time before a limiting temperature is attained. The downside is it costs a loss of body water and electrolytes. The body tries to offset this water loss by increasing the heart rate (as blood delivery to the working muscles is the product of heart rate and stroke volume, the latter decreasing as the body dehydrates in the heat). In my experience, athletes don't treat the heat with enough respect - yes, it doesn't feel pleasant - but worse than that, it doesn't have to be that hot to have a significant effect on performance. In a classic study back in 1997, Galloway and Maughan had cyclists work at 70% of their VO2max (similar to 25 mile pace) at various ambient temperatures.  Exercise time was reduced dramatically under the heat: 52 min at 31°C vs 81 min at 21°C. A reminder, it was 33 degrees on Sunday. As supported by a study published this January (By Ely and colleagues, Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010 Jan;42(1):135-41) performance decrements can be as high as 17% over the time frame of a 10 mile time trial - this could be in the order of 40 to 60W: take a look at the results from Sunday - 50W might explain the difference between 5th and 20th in the men's event.

Its fair to say that there will be a huge variation in ability to perform in the heat: mentally and physically. The size of the athlete is one factor that Dan and I discussed after the race on Monday morning in our weekly meeting - indeed, looking at the top 20 of the men's and women's event, a few people were able to step up in the rankings perhaps because of their body size - smaller riders can dissipate more heat quickly because they have a relatively bigger surface area. But to me, the conditions of this race allowed the 'cream to float to the top': it separated out those who go that extra mile in preparation.

Call it what you will - being prepared, controlling the controllables, leaving no stone unturned. Sporting performance is more than just doing the training. One fault of time triallists is that they sometimes forget that the goal of the race is to go as fast as they possibly can - its ultimately about maximising speed. Okay, the days of regarding 'training as cheating' have now passed, but, there is still a somewhat 'amateur ideal' prevalent. A rider seen using a cold vest to cool the body whilst warming up on a turbo is almost ridiculed by his / her competitors; a rider seen sticking their race number on with tub tape rather than pins is regarded as 'anal'. It gives the impression of a certain degree of apathy; or maybe people don't consider themselves good enough to try those little extras ? As a sport scientist, I see these little things as meaning the edge on competitors. Indeed, when I was riding, knowing I had looked everything about my performance before, and on race day gave me a boost as I sat on the start line.

I try to get this same philosophy across to my riders. Before the event, I provided everyone with race notes and spoke with them all individually about the ideal pacing strategy and use of their available power. We took into consideration how the wind direction might change and impact on this. I loved reading a quote from men's title winner Michael Hutchinson "Having the confidence to sit back and sit back until I got to the last roundabout and try and squeeze it up the last drag to the last corner and try and be 'heavy' for the last mile" - it summed up how best to ride the course on Sunday. I look at Michael, and Julia Shaw the ladies event winner, and they are fine examples of looking at every aspect of cycling performance - aspirational in my opinion.

Having seen the weather forecast for the weekend on Friday, I sent an email out to the PBscience riders, reminding them of the consequences from last year's similar situation. I urged them to think about using ice packs on their torso while warming up. According to Allen Lim, physiologist with Team RadioShack, keeping cool in the warm-up is "the single biggest bottleneck in the Tour, or any other sport.” Pre-cooling is a great example of how to maximise what you have fought hard to gain in training hours. By using ice vests or simply frozen peas / freezer ice packs, you can keep the body's core temperature down near to normal. Even running your wrists under cold water helps. We're going to be talking about this strategy at our mid-season workshop in July. I was interested to read an interview with Russell Downing in this month's Cycle Sport magazine - explaining how Team Sky used ladies tights packed with ice cubes during their New Year camp / racing in Australia. All part of their 'marginal gains' approach. Many of you might remember the Tour de France time trial back in 2003 when Armstrong returned back from his ride, lips caked in salt. He blamed that loss to Jan Ulrich partly on dehydration due to warming up in the heat. Ullrich reportedly warm-up in a nearby air conditioned supermarket!

On Sunday, I saw many riders compromise their warm-up or opt out of it totally. Perhaps the name 'warm-up' doesn't help - I hear all sorts of talk about "no need to warm-up today, it is already warm enough for me". However, warm-up SHOULD be called 'acid-up' as the main effect is given to performance by switching on metabolic systems and enzymes controlling them. Its why I get my riders to do maximal bursts at the end of a 40 min progressive effort. Nothing can replace that benefit - even if the heat of the day puts people off going through it. In fact, I felt a lot of riders across both mens and womens events were going through the motions - and that's sad, given the hours since last November spent preparing for this big day. 

I don't think my riders were immune to some errors in prep at the weekend - for a lot of them, they are more focused on the 25 Champs in a fortnight's time. However, having opportunities to practise these things at big events are few and far between. We'll debrief the good, the bad items from the weekend and use that information to feed into the coming races. As I often say to the riders I work with, it is one thing to make an error, the mistake is letting it happen twice!