As the sweeping hills of Kent roll by, I am learning how to get into the rhythm by dancing on the pedals to a 90's tune
Watching Chris Froome blitz Mont Ventoux in last Sunday's stage of the Tour de France aroused a familiar response from this Sunday morning rider and had me scanning the cycling websites and forums anew for expert advice that might enable me to climb my local Kent hills without my head exploding.
In among the exotic locations ? tips for tackling a stage of the Tour, warm weather training camps offered by ex-professionals like TDF winner Stephen Roche in Mallorca ? one particular ex-pro's offering caught my attention because of its incongruity.
After calling time on a 12-year career in which he includes the 2010 Tour de Luxembourg in his palmar�s, 34-year-old Matteo Carrara decided to leave his home town of Bergamo in the foothills of the Italian Alps and start his coaching practice in an altogether more urban setting ? the south London suburb of Crystal Palace. A pretty shrewd move given that Britain's love affair with the bicycle shows no signs of abating, and can only spike again if Froome manages to seal victory on the Champs Elysees this Sunday.
The website said that Matteo offers a range of training schedules to suit all levels ? from hourly one-on-one rides to three-month programmes taking in diet, analysis and weekly training guides. I arranged a morning ride. At �40 for an hour, it was a small investment for a lifetime of suffering in the saddle.
It was February when Matteo first arrived in the Cadence Cycling Performance Centre on Anerley Hill, where he now runs his training programmes, and it was snowing outside. He burst into the shop, a blur of expensive carbon and lycra, looking like an exotic bird that had lost its bearings on its winter migration. Fast forward a few months, and he introduced himself with a hearty handshake and a handful of questions about my riding routine and what I wanted from the session.
What I mostly wanted was not to be humiliated. For all the carbon and the lycra, Matteo's approach is warm and friendly. "It's normal to be nervous," he said. "I was always nervous at training camps. But we have a little meeting. You tell me what you want. And we start steady."
The sun was shining as we set off down Anerley Hill, slaloming through the Saturday morning shopping traffic. The first instruction came when we reached the quiet country roads of Kent's north downs. "Cadence always 90," he said. I learned over the course of the ride that this is Matteo's mantra for all of his new apprentices. If you keep the number of revolutions of the pedals to 90 per minute, you achieve a sustainable rhythm, and you will cycle more efficiently over a longer period of time.
And so we kept to a steady beat, rolling through the narrow, twisting lanes and gentle sweeps of the north downs around Toys Hill, Ide Hill and Titsey Hill in Kent. Over the course of the ride, Matteo would drop behind me, pull up alongside and look me up and down on the bike. He suggested subtle adjustments, such as raising my saddle by two millimetres, relaxing my grip on the handlebars and getting into a lower, more aerodynamic position on descents. Perhaps I might also want to get the annoying click in my bottom bracket seen to.
I flew down the first hill on the drops in a rush of cooling air and adrenalin before inevitably starting to falter on the climb on the other side. Matteo showed me how to dance on the pedals, transferring the weight and the power from my hips into to each turn. And I sort of got it, but what was invaluable and inspiring was watching a 12-year racing veteran ride so smoothly and in tune with his machine. "It's OK to go slow on the climbs, sometimes you can't always keep 90 cadence. In Italy, we have a phrase 'chi va piano va sano e va lontano' [he who goes softly goes safely and goes far]," he encouraged.
As we rode back up Anerley Hill, he told me with a broad smile about the "beautiful attack" he made in the Tour de Luxembourg when he dropped Lance Armstrong and Andy Schleck on the final ascent to win the race. And with that, he danced on the pedals, put on a spurt of speed and disappeared up our own mini-version of Ventoux.
I now have the mantra of "90 cadence" stuck in my brain, and on subsequent rides, I've tried to stick to that. What I've found is that it has levelled out my endurance so that I don't fly off at the start and fizzle out on the first climb. I now have the confidence to ride at regular speed rather than cycling in fits and starts. I'm working on my climbing skills, and plan to go back for another session of hill work. I'm even thinking of tackling the real Ventoux next year.
? Matteo Carrara offers a range of coaching programmes at Cadence Performance Cycling Centre, 0345 025 9746. One-on-one rides with Matteo cost �40 an hour. Group rides: �15 for two hours in small group of eight-ten cyclists. Three-month coaching programmes from �95 a month to �175 a month.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/jul/19/bike-blog-racing-training-kent
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