Welcome from New York
Roadman, let's talk about our training comp in Jirona. Cute out intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question, a disc podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Rode Man, welcome back to another Roadman Cycling Podcast. I'm actually in beautiful New Yorker this week. The Roadman training camp concluded and wrapped up out in Jaron it a couple of days ago and I did a little bit of a hole in my schedule. So I said I'd head off to Sony New Yorker and get a little bit of a recharge. The training camps are pretty full on and obviously any training camp is pretty full on but then I have the extra organizational element of hosting the camp so it's nice to come away and just detox and recharge and get some sun and sip by the pool so it's being really enjoyable I'm out in New York for the rest of the week but I want to talk to you briefly about our your own training camp because really what I want to achieve in this if you're heading off to do your own training block or Or maybe even you're doing a big training block at home. What takeaway points can you learn from error training camp to make sure you optimize the benefit from your own training camp. Before I dive into all that, let me just remind you about Patreon. The link is over on Patreon. I haven't been pushing this too much lately. The link is over on patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and patreon is the way you support the podcast and just because I don't mention it every single day doesn't mean it's not important. is how we fund the podcast and Patreon is the mechanism for covering the costs on it and I call it the beer fund. So if you bumped into me in the city and you're enjoying the podcast, would you say I'm really loving the podcast, there's a point of beer. I think a lot of guys listening to the podcast would do that but this is your chance to virtually buy me a point of beer over on that link. I'll put it in the description below. It's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and it really you know it's vindication for me the podcast is going in the right direction. So we were out in Jirona for the past week and we rented ourselves a lovely little villa kind of nestled between two of my favorite towns Jirona and Banyoles which is arguably a slightly cooler town than Jirona it's definitely a lot smaller and a a lot less hustle and bustle and I really love it up there and beautiful lake up in Banyoles as well. That hosted the Olympics in Barcelona rowing back in I think that's back in the 90s I'm showing the age. So we had a nice mix of roids and we opted not to do a recovery day in the middle of it. We pushed straight through so we did a nice mix of all good solid endurance miles with some threshold climb and thrown in there and we covered a lot of the big climbs. We took in the Hincap Yerut on one of the days which is probably the most famous route in Jirona. It is about a hundred kilometer ride from where we were staying under two major climbs, Els Angels and Santa Piaea. This route was really made famous by George Hincapie, the former US postal and discovery rider and it's still named after him and urban legend is that when Hincapie's wife was pregnant he couldn't stray too far from home he needed to be within you know shoot distance at Jirona so when the other lads were going off to do five, six-hour endurance rides. He just rode loops of this Santa Paella L's Angels and there's two 20 to 30 minute climbs thrown in there and a lot of suffering. We drew that one in on one of the days.
Rocca Coba equalizes everyone
We had a roof called the Cake Shop or Coastal Loop on another one of the days which is another famous roof from the pros. Unfortunately, the Cake Shop, which is the famous coffee stop the pros take was closed but we'll get it next time out and that was a long day, five and a half hours. Another notable day was Rocker Koba where we'd done the roadman, Rocker Koba challenge where we tried to make Rocker Koba in our age plus 10 minutes. Some guys made it, some guys didn't make it, some guys had no chance. We'd young lads on the camp who were 17 years old so to do it in 27 minutes would have been a new Strava record but it was a great great group we had out there and a mix of ages everything from 17 I think to you know touching on late 50s I think 58 59 years old so a real you know crazy spread in ages and a crazy spread and abilities from cat one Reuters to sporty Reuters are absolutely beginner sporty Reuters and everyone got on great and I actually just put a post up on Instagram and this was something that struck me, especially on the rocker call the day, that those guys come up from different backgrounds from investing bank and some VCs that are running phones, some guys who are working in construction and some students doing leaving cert and on the whole training campus it especially struck me on rocker call but on a climb like rocker call but you don't carry baggage on a climb like rocker call but everybody's equal It doesn't matter if your social status, how much money you have in your bank account, work problems don't matter, family problems, relationship problems, stresses, you can't carry baggage on a climb like Rockercobah. It's boiled down, it's broken down to man versus mountain, man and machine versus mountain and it's just suffering regardless of your background. We all suffer equally on it and you can see the pictures at the top of Rockercobah. I've used one of them in in the thumbnail for today's show and it's just everybody up there happy. Everybody's in equal. It's like you're transported back to being a child again. Everyone's in equal, everyone's a roadman at the top. It was absolutely brilliant. So the basis that underpins going on a training camp like this, it's something called super compensation. And super compensation, it's kind of this phenomenon that after training impulse, your body will tend to recover above its original baseline. So when we get a training impulse or a big training stress like that, our body comes fatigued and our physical capacity actually diminishes. And it's only recovery that brings us back above our original level. So the way I like to explain it to clients is training gives, training doesn't make us stronger. Training gives the possibility that that we're going to get stronger. And this possibility is only realized after recovery. So it's recovery that actually makes us stronger. So where we do a big condensed super compensation block like we've had at this Girona training camp, the week following that is typically very, very important. And you see a lot of athletes getting sick the week after training camps. And it's because they don't look after themselves properly week after. The body has gone through an extraordinary strain. You see this after stage races as well. You will get through it day after day. Your body won't let you get sick during it. But after when you give it a chance to recover, if you don't look after it properly, your body will break down, you'll get call sores, mouth rollsters, you'll be sick, you'll be tired. So stuff to really prioritize the week following a training camp. You need to plan an easy training week. There's no point in going back into interval straight away. You need to have a mixture of complete days off, that's a total recovery of active recovery, which is like recovery on the bike, or I'd say gone for a walk on the bike, super easy recovery rides.
Post-camp recovery essentials
You control in a little bit of core work and then endurance rides. And maybe five, six days after, you can start showing in a small bit of intensity again. Sleep is another element which is super important. And time and time again, I'll beat you over the head with a math walk or why we sleep, book if I see you. I reference a time and time again. We need to be getting eight hours of sleep, especially in the week post training camp. Hydration is also super important with minimum tree leaders of hydration every single day. You're actually just looking for a low stress environment. We've created a shit ton of cortisol week to stress hormone. So you need to have strategies in place around reduction of cortisol. So strategies could include effective morning routines. This is so much the stuff I get into in the Roman blueprint. Effective morning and evening routines which help lower cortisol levels. This stuff used to be on the fringes of our sport, but now it's so so important. Other strategies include meditation, good food. When I say good food, I mean single ingredient foods. Like an example of a single ingredient food is a potato, an apple, an orange, an onion. an example of a multi-gradying field is a whisper, a piece of pasta, a piece of bread, borzoic pareto waffle. These are multi-ingradying fields. We want to have as many single ingredient fields as we can this week because they create lower stress on the body, lower digestive stress. So when are we going again? Is the big question? Well, and on the soil at the time, possibly do something in the New Year. definitely gonna make it at minimum in annual because it was just such an amazing way to get to know everyone, to build a community and a tribe around Roadman and we launched our new kit there which you're gonna see coming out next week. The new kit absolutely lovely if you check out social. You'll see some of the new kit that's dropped but yeah it was probably the most enjoyable training camp I've ever been on the organizational side of just such a great bunch of lads who are motivated and pushed each other for the entire week and I think some long-lasting friendships were formed on this camp. So, roadmen, enjoy your day, ride safe and I'm gonna chat to you again tomorrow. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the eight-week challenge. So for 8 weeks I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself, whatever that is. For 8 weeks I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. This plan is going to be laser focused on your goal and I'm going to navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments so don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling and I went off and taught I was a big business man. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling but I knew after a bit to train it alone it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system it needed 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever I want to share with you this exact system I used to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like I'm going to give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I used, the cookbooks and recipes I used and even the motivational audios I listened to to get back track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty all soon.