Training observation #1

Building leg muscle over the winter appears to be useful. Because this year I didn't, and I seem to be feeling the effects. Let me explain : in my training program, you do a bunch of heavy leg lifting during the winter, culminating with a month or so of really heavy weights, with few repetitions. For example last year I recall pushing almost 800 lbs in Leg Presses, over 5x my body weight. Then you go into on the bike training, then racing, etc. So after many months on the bike, I went back to the gym to see how many lbs I could push with my legs, and the results were pathetic - like no strength or power at all. Yet I could ride my bike for 3 hours hard in a race with no problem. From this I concluded that leg exercises in the gym must be useless. So, I didn't do them this year.

So what ? Well, I noticed that when I started doing intervals on the bike this season, my legs were hurting, but my lungs were good. So then I determined that building up the legs with weights is fairly useless wrt racing, but it provides a training effect early in the season by forcing the lungs to work harder. So you don't need it later on, but earlier on is good as a jump start.