while we're making plans. So I've been dipping in and out of Friel lately and am going to make some fairly random notes about it that I will come back and clean up later.

Take-home messages

So far, these would appear to be

• goals. Work out what you want to do and when, and assign priorities to them: A rces are season goals, B are important, and C are races-for-training that there's no shame in missing
• periodization, on several scales: both on the annual level (aim for peak fitness one two or three times in a year, training intensity ramps up through the year to each "category A" target, then falls off before building up again to the next), the monthly level (one week in every four is "light"), and the weekly level (make sure the easy workouts are easy so that you're in good shape to make the hard ones hard). Before a "race" period you'd expect two weeks' "peak", 8 weeks "build" and a 12 week "base" - prior to that is "preparation".

• know your limiters. These are not necessarily all your weaknesses, just the ones that are "critical path" to achiving your goals. They may be race-specific, even - if your climbing performance sucks, that doesn't necessarily matter much if all your events are flat.

Friel classifies training into three basic categories:

• force - how hard you can push the pedals
• endurance - how long you can push them for
• "speed skill" - whether you're pushing them efficiently

and then introduces "muscular endurance", "anaerobic endurance" and "power" as being combinations of each of them, which I find oddly reminiscent of Aristotle combining "earth" and "fire" to get "dry". But maybe that's just me. Anyway, there are a whole bunch of suggested workouts designed for each of these areas, and a chart which says "if you plan to train 300 hours this year, you should be doing 8 hours a week in week n, and it should be x% on this area and y% on that", and then you just slot things in as appropriate.

Random musing

• there are difference between skating and cycling
  1. technique plays a far bigger role: the Speed Skills workouts are not really relevant, but they can be replaced with technique sessions. Will need to define exactly what goes into those sessions to make them useful
  2. races are mostly a lot shorter: a 1:15 event is going to be over faster than most bike races. This may have a bearing on training duration and intensity

• Intention is currently (a) find a fast German marathon in early season, (b) another one at the end of the season - such as Berlin if I can get a decent start, and (c) the LIM, becase it's the home race. Maybe also Le Mans: I still have to think about how I can do a better job of it than last year and maybe even enjoy it. So that's three peaks and if the first is mid-May, that means Base 1 starts more or less when the year does. (Also need to find out when Prezelle and the One Eleven are, and see how they fit in)
• I need to work out how much of the non-training skating I do (which is approximately all the skating I currently do, yes) qualifies as training and what kind of training it is. In this regard it would really help to find my lactate threshold.
• my biggest weaknesses right now are technical and mental, and I'm reasonably sure they'll be limiters in any event that's not "skate in a straight line on a completely traffic-free road". Which is most of them. Oh yeah, and diet, but I have very little idea as yet on how to fix that without actually, y'know, cooking.
• Although the timetable doesn't actually require starting Base 1 until January, an eight week Preparation phase does seem like overkill, so I think I'll be bringing some of the Base workouts forwards to this year if only for the variety. And let's not forget that things will probably stop for a week over Christmas. For the moment, though, it's pretty straightforward: get the miles in on easy aerobic workouts, and learn to go round corners.