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Tweak your fitness
Because of the pack style nature of inline racing strategy and tactics play a key role in ultimately determining one's success. With air resistance being the overwhelming obstacle to speed, drafting serves as the tactical platform for attacks and surges in pace. These dynamics heavily tax one's fitness, and the ability to accelerate, respond quickly to breaks, and recover from short, hard efforts should be a primary training focus for all skaters.
Distance and
steady speed workouts have their rightful place in the
annual plan, primarily in the early pre-season or for
specific preparation for ultra marathon events such
as Athens to Atlanta. But once a skater is reasonably
fit an increasing percentage of time should be dedicated
towards developing acceleration. When skaters get dropped
from the pack it's rarely because of a high sustained
pace. Skaters get into trouble when they prove unable
to match acceleration, gaps open up, the draft is lost,
and once off the back it's almost impossible to fight
your way back onto the tail end of the paceline. The
importance of acceleration training should be readily
apparent for all skaters, especially those to repeatedly
find themselves shed off the pack after a handful of
surges in speed.
Training to improve acceleration must be broad in scope.
Accelerating from zero 15 km/hr is very different from
accelerating from 15 km/hr to 30 km, as is accelerating
from 30 km/hr to top speed. Because of this, training
must include accelerations from various initial starting
speeds, as well using different levels of effort. Acceleration
is not necessarily a sprint, it is the rate of change
of speed. Since we're talking about a rate, broad-based
training must involve practicing at different levels
of effort. For example, a skater might accelerate from
20 km/hr to top speed over a distance of 200m, or over
a shorter distance of 50m. While the beginning and end
points are the same, the rate of change of speed is
obviously higher when executing acceleration over a
shorter distance. Sometimes in races the acceleration
in the pack is gradual, other times it's abrupt. Skaters
need to especially focus their training on improving
their ability to respond to the more intense, sprint-oriented
accelerations.
Acceleration
training takes the form of classic interval training
structure. That is, a hard intense effort followed by
a period of recovery, and then subsequent repeats. The
duration of both 'work' and 'recovery' periods can be
manipulated to produce the desired training load and
total volume of work to be performed. Because high levels
of lactic acid are produced by intense efforts, a long
'set rest' period of recovery is often required after
a certain number of repeats are
performed. Additional sets using a given number of repetitions
can then be done.
opyright © 2004 Barry Publow. All Rights Reserved.
