February Newsletter

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Three quotes to remember this month.

"Don't optimise the thing you are not doing"

• First make sure you are, training well, eating well and sleeping well before anything else.

"It's very hard to beat the person who is having fun"

• You don't have to do this, you get to do this.

"Think in years, act in days"

• We usually overestimate what we can achieve in months and underestimate what we can achieve in years. Ups and downs are a given.

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Upcoming Group Rides

Sunday 4th Feb - Coast Loop - 3h30 Loop

Wednesday 7th - 6 am Kohi Cafe - 1h 15m Loop

Wednesday 14th - 6 am Kohi Cafe - 1h 15m Loop

Wednesday 21st - 6 am Kohi Cafe - 1h 15m Loop

Sunday 25th - Prision Loop - 4h Loop

Strava Group

New and Noteworthy Events

​North Harbour Crits - Fridays - Starts 6pm 8pm - Feb 9th, 16th, 23rd, Mar 1st and 8th. This will be a lot of fun! NH are running 5 grades of short punchy racing with a fun social environment. Good for working on those race skills and tactics!

​CMC Super City Team Series - 5 Race Series. Starting in August. Not a lot of details out yet, but it looks like it will be some wicked and varied style of racing. Grit will for sure put some teams in for this!

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2024 NZ Cycle Classic Done & Dusted

It was a pretty cool experience to be behind the wheel at this year's NZ Cycle Classic. I was very privileged to be looking after the Ibuilt squad. A massive thank you to Bill Blackmore and Ibuilt for making this team happen. Also to Stacey Rickette (who also works for Ibuilt) for all his work during the race! It was a great experience for the boys and for myself. After the success of this Tour we are hatching a plan to take on Tour of Southland, Cycle Classic and Gravel and Tar in 2024/2025 with the aim of bringing on new sponsors.

Some of the highlights were:

1. The team talks/debriefs in the evening, 15-20mins of actual serious race planning and 30 mins of shit-talking and laughing right before dinner each night.

2. Hearing over the radio that Cameron had made the final selection of 11 riders on the queen stage Admiral hill with a few kilometres to go. This sealed him the top 10 on GC (2nd U23) and had him tied on time with 4th place overall! For our little team that was massive!

3. Watching Matt rip it off the front of the bunch regularly and take it to these pro-riders. It puts into perspective when he drops us on the Grit rides... Matt is off to the Netherlands this season. No doubt he will terrorise them and not us for a few months! Pheeew!

4. After a great stage one, Carlo woke up the next morning not feeling himself. Stage two started hard and fast at over 45kph average speed, he dropped after 20 kms, and with over 110k to go. As he got to our car behind the peloton, he yelled out that he was done. We pulled over, I jumped out ready to take his bike. As I got out of the car, I was reminded of when I pulled out of Tour of Southland back in 2009. To this day I still regret doing that. All I had to say was "Are you sure this is what you want to do?" With the peloton already a few minutes up the road. He sighed with a pained look on his face and hopped back on his bike and continued riding. I felt bad as we drove off, knowing he was going to have an impossible battle in 27 deg heat to make time cut (which excludes riders from the race that finish outside of 15% of the winner's time). I honestly didn't think he would finish, and expected he would ride the 40ks to Martinborough, climb off and miss out the 8 circuits around the town. I was wrong! He finished it solo and within the time cut. He was on the start line the next day!
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​Final Day Highlights​

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Oceania Track Camp 7th-11th

From the road to the boards. Starting on the 10th of Feb to the 13th I will be part of the CNZ coaching team running a pre Oceania champs track camp for pathway athletes from all over NZ. We have a couple of grit coached riders attending this camp. While I look to contribute as much as I can, for me its always a great opportunity to catch up with the best coaches in NZ and take as many learnings as I can and bring them back to the Grit & SKC squad.

I would really encourage you all to come and check out the Oceania Track Champs if you get a chance. Racing kicks off on Wednesday 14th and finishes Sunday the 18th February. I would highly recommend a day trip to Cambridge. Bring the bike and head out into the quiet country roads, then find a seat up in the stands of the velodrome with your post-ride snacks and watch some top athletes rip around the track for a couple of hours. It is an exciting and punchy format of racing Being in an indoor stadium it is spectator-friendly.

Check out the race programme here and event website here​

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Training Process: Fatigue Test

The fatigue test is a simple exercise we have been using at Grit for a couple of years now. It is a very simple way to track and asses training readiness and a great exercise to help build self-awareness. Borrowed from the UAE Cycling Team. It is a much more simplified version of the Lamberts Sub-Maximal Cycling Test (LSCT). The fatigue test has you riding at 100% FTP for 3 mins recording power, HR and RPE. By keeping Power constant, we can monitor changes in RPE and HR to make assumptions about how well you are recovering and adapting to training. The beauty of it being such a short effort at a submaximal intensity means it can be used as part of the warm up. Unlike a maximal test we can repeat these multiple times during the week if needed without impacting the quality of your training session.

Good data is essential. Here are 5 key things to get that good data.

1. Make sure you use your HR monitor - HR tells us how the body is responding to the power output. Without this the test becomes much less useful.

2. Rate the perceived intensity of the effort from 1 to 10 and leave a short 1-2 sentence comment to give context. Data without context is fairly useless.

3. If doing it outdoors try and keep power as consistent as possible. power is the control variable. If it's not consistent then we can't compare HR and RPE to past efforts.

4. Accumulate a lot of data - One test on its own tells us almost nothing, completed over many months and years we start to get a really good picture of how you tend to respond.

5. If legs feel unusually sore and heavy, HR is depressed then think about either aiming for the low end of a power zone or opt for an easy spin or day off altogether instead.

Next time you have a crack at this test during your warm up or as a stand alone effort keep those 5 tips front of mind to help makes these more useful.

Content Worth Consuming

Athlete Training Manifesto's

If you haven't come across these before they are really interesting. Basically two incredible athletes Neils Van Der Poel (an Olympic gold medallist in speed skating) and Killian Jornet (an Ultra Runner and former winner of the Mont Blanc Challenge) layout, in depth, their unique training process.

Both are a great example of the process of finding what works for you the individual.

While the specifics of what they do in their respective sports do not directly apply to us as cyclists. The principles of endurance training and performance are exactly the same.

​How to Skate a 10k

​Killian Jornet Analyses​

Book Recommendation - Atomic Habits

"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." James Clear.

With the holiday season coming to an end and the sobering reality of life, fading those lofty New Year's resolutions away. Now's a good time to reflect those goals and habits.

Atomic habits has some really practical takeaways in this area. The main themes are goals give you direction, but its your small daily habits that get you there. He argues that in order to make habits you have to make them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Having a 1 year old has got me re-reading this and implementing all kinds of new habits. In a lot of ways I feel much more on top of life than when I essentially had all the time in the world.

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If you got this far congrats! That's a wrap!

Cheers Team!