Crossfitting by Bike

I haven’t been around CrossFit Portland as much as in the past but don’t think I’ve been off doing preacher curls and leg presses at the local Gold’s! In addition to making the occasional appearance at CFPDX I’ve been spending a decent amount of time in the saddle getting in some miles for fun, and for the upcoming cyclocross season.

The vast majority of cycling training resources around are fairly conservative and old school, prescribing many miles of boring (and largely ineffective for my purposes) base training. Seeing near constant improvements in General Physical Preparedness from two years of crossfitting and after bouncing some ideas off of Scott, I knew that I’d deviate from standard periodization training on the bike. Spending months riding and not being allowed to get my heart rate above some magic number would likely burn me out and make me able to ride far, but slowly. ‘Cross races are 45 minutes of pure hell maximal effort bike riding, jumping over barriers and running up muddy hills. Explosive power is an advantage.

I just got done with a CrossFit-esque workout that I adapted from The Cyclist’s Training Bible. The protocol, after a warmup:

On a 6-8% uphill grade
-60″ of 90% effort in a medium-high gear
-30″ of 100% effort in a high (hard) hear
-4′ rest

My intention was to do 8 intervals. I only did 5. Why? Well, you know how in the middle of some CrossFit workouts you feel hypoxic and your whole body feels like it could fall apart? Take that same winded feeling but concentrate that full body burn directly into your quads. Yow! There’s no doubt that CrossFit workouts are super intense, but having that intensity largely in one muscle group is super intense in a different way. I *could* have done three more sets, yes, but my performance was quickly degrading (and I’m guessing becoming less effective since I wasn’t able to express power in the same way) and I knew I’d be going on a nice long cruise tomorrow.

For some balance, I finished my workout with 5 sets of 5 pushups and pullups. To be honest, these didn’t go too quickly. After spiking my heart rate so severely multiple times on the bike, it shot up again right away during my first set of pullups! The entire thing took me a total of one hour, door-to-door.

I plan on coming up with some more CrossFit workouts for the bike as well as using the great CrossFit Endurance site for some inspiration. After racing last season with plenty of crossfitting but minimal bike training I’m interested to see how I feel with more sport specific training.

Now for some fuel!

July 5, 2008 | Filed Under Exercises, Workouts 

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One Response to “Crossfitting by Bike”

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