by Raquel Miller, ALP athlete who works with Coach Alison Powers

April 2013 was my first month of coaching with Alison Powers/ALP Cycles Coaching. Nearly three years later, and she is still my coach, even though I have decided I no longer want to be a bike racer; just a fit person. My last race as a “fully committed” bike racer was August 14, 2015. I would love to, however, do a few Friday Night Kreb Cycles races in Riverhead, NY this coming season because they are fun, on the way to the beach, and you could not ask for a better group of people to spend your Friday nights with!

I put the words fully committed in quotations because together they are subjective, and are greatly influenced by the lifestyle you lead. I raced a total of five years. (Yes, I know, not long compared to most people in the sport, but given my athletic background, I feel qualified to write this blog entry.) I had a few jobs during that time, and I even had a year or so where I was unemployed. For the record, being unemployed did not get me into better shape, or make me a better bike racer. I had my worst race season that year.

I worked in finance for a bit, commuting to Wall Street from the Upper Eastside (a horrible commute) and sat on my butt for the greater part of eight hours. Most days, after work, I sat in my care anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours searching for parking. In New York City you do not get to keep the same parking spot (on the streets) all week long unless you would like to pay for a cushy parking garage spot, which would compete to the cost of a nice Midwest apartment. I know because I am from Indiana.

My last year of racing, I worked as an Exercise Physiologist with our most precious population, geriatrics. I taught Strength, Mobility, and Balance classes at various assisted living and independent living homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I knew prior to taking the job that it would require a lot of commuting, driving, public transportation, and walking. The commuting was tiring and far more than what most people would like to do, especially in the New York City area, but overall I loved the job. Really cold days were awful. Really hot days were twice as awful. I sweat a lot!

The worst part about having a job is how it affects your training. Let us be really realistic here – the majority of cyclists in the United States work some type of job. This is a fact; one I do not even need data to prove. Some people work 20 hours per week, while others work 60+ hours per week. Some have jobs where they sit all day, while others are on their feet all day. Some people work for home, while others have to report to an office. Some work year round, while others get their summers off. Some have high stress jobs, while others have low stress jobs. You get the point.

When an ALP Cycles Coach is preparing to work with a new client, or renewing an existing client,t hey ask you to fill out a New Athlete Questionnaire. My favorite questions was always: How many weekly hours do you have to train? Be realistic. TO TRAIN includes, yoga, strength training, etc., not just bike riding. REALISTIC – what is the meaning of realistic to a bike racer?! We all want to do as much as possible to be fit and fast. But was it realistic for me to tell Alison that I had up to two hours per day to train Monday through Friday when I knew everyday of my life would not be stress free; the trains would not always operate flawlessly or at all, the traffic would not be a breeze, the weather would not always cooperate, I would likely not find parking in 15 minutes every time, I would not feel fabulous everyday, and I would not always fee like riding on prescribed ride days. For the majority of my bike racing years with Alison, I rode a total of four, max of five hours, during the week, with two days being rest days. On the weekends, I would ride two and a half to four hours each day, rarely doing two, four hour days back to back. For me, this was really realistic, and the reason why I thrived with Alison’s coaching.

The moral of the story: Be a “Really Realistic” Bike Racer. It is virtually impossible to toe the line with competitors who have the same work/life/family balance challenges as yourself. These are the uncontrollable. The good news is, there are far more controllable; training, diet, sleep, attitude, etc., that can have a positive (or negative) effect on your training and racing. Do not “compare to despair”, as my favorite yoga instructor used to say. Focus on you, and the time that you really, realistically have to give to the sport of cycling, not what your friend or competitor can give. In fact, using this approach with all things in life will make you a happier, healthier, and far more balanced human being!

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by Mia Cheeseman, Athlete that works with Jennifer Sharp, ALP Cycles Coaching

Too often, life gets in the way of our cycling training. If it’s not work, it’s a relationship or family stressor that inverts itself ever so inconveniently, thus creating a challenge to find a way to balance it all out. This past year I lost a few members of my small family and I wanted to be there for the remaining survivors. But there’s the cycling plan. The plan in your Training Peaks calling out your name, “Youuuuu whooo, Mia!! You’re going to lose fitness and become a complete blob if you miss this week’s workouts.”

One way I found helpful to conquer that voice in my head was to take my workouts mobile. I brought my trainer, stretchy band, and dumbbells with me back home and set up shop in my Grandma’s garage (a balmy 32F that my workouts increased to 40F!). I only had one set of dumbbells so for some of my strength training, I filled up jugs of empty detergent (approximately 8lbs). It was my little slice of solstice and a solution that was close by to minimize time away from family. I’d slide into Starbucks and grabs a low fat turkey bacon sandwich for quick grub on the go (less than 250 calories, some protein) and a coffee (free refills for Gold Card members) and do 25 pushups in the restaurant bathroom. Unconventional, why yes, very, but hey, I got 90% of my workouts done without compromising too much.

Striking a balance is a life long journey but it starts with good communication. Let your coach know and she’ll help by granting permission to do what you gotta do for your priorities in life. And when you can’t quite get to everything, do what you can when you can.

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by Abby Mickey, ALP Athlete and UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling Team Member

Every year comes with new challenges. The key is to take those challenges in stride and learn from them. Challenges are good for you. They help you grow as an athlete and, more importantly, as a person. This year I had no shortage of challenges, from dealing with cracked teeth the entire season resulting from a crash in the early spring to putting way too much pressure on myself and eventually (sooner rather than later) cracking, this year was a tough one. But, every year is tough in it’s own way, right? Right.

The number one thing I learned this year is that while putting a little pressure on yourself is good, you want to perform well, you want to be the best, it’s easy to get carried away and overloaded. I say putting pressure on yourself can be good because it will make you work harder. I believe that it is easier to deal with pressure from yourself than pressure from a team or an individual, but that’s just my personal opinion. Anyway, putting pressure on yourself can be good but as with everything in life, moderation is key. If you put too much pressure on yourself, that’s when the stress comes. For me, going into the year on a big new shiny team, I was so eager to prove that I was good enough that every single misstep, every failed race or even training ride, was the end of the world. It didn’t take long to wear on me. I race better when I am calm, I know I’ve prepared the best I can, I know the plan, all I need to do is ride. I learned to go easy on myself, because by April I was my own worst enemy. Once I figured out how to use the pressure to my advantage, in training rather than racing, I got a lot faster (and a lot more fun) to be around.

Another really excellent lesson I learned this year was to work on your weaknesses. This was a really fun lesson to learn. It was June, and I wasn’t racing very much, so I called up teammate Cari Higgins and asked if she would race Tour of America’s Dairyland with me. I would be lying if I said she didn’t laugh at first. That was was the general reaction when I showed up on the starting line of the first criterium, why is there a climber in our race? By day 3 I was never farther than 10 places back. By day 6 people no longer gave me a hard time about being at a criterium series, instead they started saying “great race” and “you’re really good at covering,” and by the last day I was one of the gang. It helped a month or so later when I FINALLY made “crit squad,” the group of riders who does the criterium in the states on UnitedHealthcare, my trade team. That was, without a question, the highlight of my year. No, I’m not kidding. I cried. Because it showed how far I had come and how hard I had worked.

Weight is not everything. As a climber, this is a really hard lesson to learn. It’s easy to say it, easy to think it, but the second you’re on that climb and someone is going pas you, you’re thinking “darn, I would have been faster if I was three pounds lighter.” This might be true, you might also have been faster if you’d been sleeping through the night, or if you’d had enough to drink throughout the race, or if you hadn’t been off the bike for 10 days because of a concussion. Weight isn’t everything, and getting totally crazy about dropping two extra points isn’t good for your head, and sometimes it’s not good for your body either. Eating a cookie is not going to ruin your entire season.

From the beginning of the year I started studying diets. At first I was attempting a very low carb, heavy fat and protein diet. I wasn’t losing weight and I wasn’t riding well either. I would get crazy hungry on rides and then every few days completely lose control and eat an entire medium bag of M&M’s. Then, I tried counting calories. Like every single calorie I ate, and not subtracting the right amount of calories I was burning on rides, because I was like “oh I’ll lose weight faster.” This resulted in a similar situation as the low carb diet I’d tried, and it was pretty stupid, honestly. I was grumpy, and riding like crap, obviously. Finally, in July, I found what worked for me. Via trial and error, which I think was really good for me, I figured out that I NEED carbs for breakfast if I want to get through a ride alive, and I NEED protein if I want to recover in time for the next day. This is basic science, and every single book about cycling fitness and training will tell you to eat carbs and protein after a ride, but I had to learn it on my own, the hard way. I learned it’s way more important to focus on training and letting the weight lose itself than to focus on weight and have training come second. Writing that now I’m smacking myself on the forehead and thinking it should be common sense, well it wasn’t for a while, but I am so glad I know that now.

This leads me to the last thing I learned, bike racing isn’t everything. It is so so important, especially for women as we will not make a living at racing bikes, to have other interests. If you’re at your target race, for the year, and you fail, you need something else to show you that it’s not the end of the world. Throughout my crazy dieting attempts in the early season, and because I grew up in restaurants my parents worked in, I started to really love to cook. And as the year went on I got more and more into cooking. Now I am plotting going to culinary school and dreaming of opening my own restaurant. It’s so important to be able to focus on something other than bike racing, something constant that isn’t going to change. Boyfriends and girlfriends or friends are great, but you also need to take care of yourself, you need to be able to pick yourself up when you fall, and if you’ve got something in your life that is constantly there, whether it be school, reading, painting, brewing beer, whatever, you’re life in general will be better for it.

Alison only asked me to write about three things I learned but I couldn’t cut out the fourth. To summarize: don’t be too hard on yourself. Always test your weaknesses. Weight is not everything. And have other interests. I think these things are so important, and I can barely wait to use these new lessons next season. The base period for 2016 is about to start and all I can say is, bring on the new challenges! I can’t wait to keep learning and growing next year with the help of Alison Powers and the UnitedHealth Pro Cycling team!

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