Determine your physical shape is a must

When to start preparing? This is the most frequently asked question. This is very individual – it all depends on the initial basic skills. Someone has been riding a bicycle under the frame all his childhood and, sitting on a road bike, he will go right away and well, 3-4 training sessions on technique are enough for him, and you can go into battle.

And someone’s first bike in life is a road bike, and then you need to start from the very basics: how to keep your balance, and how to enter turns, and how to pedal correctly. In this case, I would begin to talk about a few months of regular training.

How to choose a suitable distance for a bike?

Of course, you should not immediately aim for long distances and difficult tracks. Usually on racing sites there is always a track relief or climb – for beginners, you should try to choose the minimum so that the first race is fun and does not die, twisting on the climbs, or squinting your eyes in fear on the descents.

The first races should be more introductory: how is it to ride a group race? And then, having gained some experience, you can complicate your life. If we talk about a person who will go for the first time, then it is worth taking the minimum distance – 30 km. And it will not even be about cycling, but more about the atmosphere and understanding how everything happens. Usually, for 30 km, participants do not even gather in groups much, which is just in hand for a beginner.

Further, as self-confidence increases, – 60 km, everything is already more serious there, and in time for the first time it will take at least two hours. And you can get together in a group and understand that the skills of eating and drinking are necessary.
But let the experienced racers choose the longest distance (they vary depending on the starts – from 90 to 120 km). If you just want to test your strength on a long distance, then choose a bike ride, and if you have been in the saddle for more than a year and want to measure your strength with the same experienced guys, then see you at the race!

What should be done in preparation?

The most important thing is still training on a bike. Because during the race, the bike is your friend, comrade and brother, and you need to understand how it will behave when going into a turn, or when shifting gears uphill. If we talk about additional training, then everything is the same as everywhere else: add general physical training to strengthen the muscles of the core, which will help increase endurance.

If you are a beginner, then you should not enter the intensive heart rate zone. For high-quality growth, you need a foundation (the so-called aerobic pillow), and most importantly, that it be safe. It’s like in building a house, if the foundation is prepared with high quality, then the house will stand for a long time – it’s the same here.

What to do on the eve of the bike race?

What you definitely don’t need is to do a heavy workout the day before the bike ride. There are amateurs who, out of fear, want to check and ride along the entire race track, then I can say for sure: the next day the bike race will go very hard. On the eve, you can easily ride, shake your legs and, of course, try to get a good night’s sleep.

Mistakes in preparation for the bike race

The most important thing in training in all sports is the presence of not only training days, but also recovery days. It’s like for beginners: they want everything at once, and they start training every day, as if they want to fill in the gaps for a lifetime, and the race calendar is such that every weekend there is a start. And since the body adjusts gradually, it is necessary to give it the opportunity to recover, not to overdo it at the very beginning.

Problems and mistakes on the bike track: how to avoid them?

Probably the most basic is the fear of riding in a group. Because you have to control not only your ride and your bike, but also try to calculate the behavior of the surrounding participants in the race, and at the initial stages it is very difficult. I also often notice that the guys forget to eat at a distance, after a few hours of active work, energy reserves are depleted, and if you do not feed on time, the body goes into energy saving mode, the person ceases to control what is happening around. The goal is to get to the finish line. Just at such moments, mass blockages occur.

The ability to ride a bike in a group, of course, is gained only by experience, and it is better that this experience is gained precisely in group training, and not only in mass races or races. For example, on weekends we often go to volume training with a large team in order to learn how to make shifts, to be patient somewhere, so as not to fall out of the group. And just at such long training bike sessions, the second problem is solved – this is nutrition. You learn to eat right, you already begin to understand when it’s better to have time to eat so that you don’t get covered, again there is an opportunity to try different things: someone likes to chew on bars, and it’s easier for someone to squeeze the gel into themselves – it’s all very individual.

The main mistake is probably the loss of concentration. You need to be attentive to everything: who is around you, what is the surface of the road, what is the route of the track, when are the turns and turns. And especially at the end of the bike race, when the participant is already tired, hungry, he literally looks at his feet and cannot fully concentrate on the road.