Swami's Cycling Club: Guru News

November 2024

President's Corner

It was fantastic seeing so many of you at Swami’s Fall Club Night! Such a great opportunity to get to see and interact with my fellow gurus off the bike. I'm always thankful to Cadence for hosting and the deals and excellent food and drink provided by Moto Deli and Rouleur.

A couple of reminders: first, the Swamdo is coming up very soon. Make sure you register! Also, we're standardizing the start times of

the Saturday rides from Cadence - they all start rolling at 8:15. This has been a source of confusion that this change will hopefully resolve.

Finally, I’m crossing my fingers it’s not going to rain Sunday morning and I get to see many of you on the Social Ride!

Mark Steele

11/2 All Saturday Cadence rides will start rolling at 8:15

Another reminder that as of Saturday, November 2, both the Swami’s Saturday B/C/D ride and the Swami’s World Famous ride will leave from Cadence Cyclery starting at 8:15. As always the A/B groups will roll first, followed by the C and D groups.

11/3 Social Ride

On Sunday, November 3, we're hosting our monthly Swami's Social Ride. It’s a conversationally-paced ride where you can meet long-time as well as new Swami’s members. You can check out all of the details here. A reminder: we now start and finish the Social Rides at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters in Bressi Ranch (map). Wear a Swami's kit from any year to get a coffee and baked good on Swami’s!

Route: 31 miles/1608’ https://ridewithgps.com/routes/41947784

11/9 Swami’s 9th Annual Gran Fondo: Swamdo 2024!

This year the free-for-all is free for all! To encourage everyone to try their best to conquer the 101 mile, 7500’ Swamdo, or the shorter but just as amazing Medio and Piccolo routes, we’re reducing the registration fee to $0. So come to the Swamdo on Saturday, November 9! No matter which route you do, you’ll feel like you’ve earned the party afterward, where Swami’s members who registered get a sandwich and beer at Rouleur for $10.

For all the details plus registration link, go to our Swamdo page.

11/11 Veterans Day ride

On Monday, November 11, join us at Cadence Cyclery in a commemorative Veterans Day ride. See our ride calendar and Facebook page for more details as the date approaches.

11/16 Udo Heinz/Lentz Memorial Ride

On Saturday, November 16, we'll join Antje Heinz and and Lauren Lentz to ride the 9th edition of the Udo Memorial Ride in remembrance of all cyclists fallen on the road. Through their life stories, we promote respectful behavior toward cyclists on the road. In honor of our family members, friends, or fellow cyclists, let's share the moment over 3 different routes in beautiful San Diego North County. Group leaders and sweepers will ensure safety of the riders.

The ride will leave from the Canyon Bicycles Showroom, 5600 Avenida Encinas, Carlsbad (map) and will feature the following routes:

75 miles/5208’, 8:00 AM: https://www.strava.com/routes/3153862699347475298
53 miles/3552’, 8:15 AM: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/44609548
25 miles/1271’, 8:30 AM: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/44827582

11/28 Thanksgiving Day All Stripes ride

On Thursday, November 28, while your turducken is cooking, join us for calorie-preburning All Stripes ride. ALL STRIPES rides are brought to you by local teams like Swami's, Wolfpack, Coureur, GirlGang, Ranchos, SDBC, Celo, and VeloNutz, among others, and partners like Cadence, Rouleur, MotoDeli, Queenstage, Wrenchhouse, Canyon, SRAM, Hammer, Almsthre and many more. See our ride calendar and Facebook page for more details as the date approaches.

Race with Swami’s!

Have you been looking to get into road racing? Our Swami’s sponsored racing team is looking for new members. Gain experience in races, get reimbursed for selected race expenses as a Swami’s member, and have a lot of fun! Contact Scott Claes at scott@claes.biz.

The Cycling Coach

Cycling coach Maddison Russell has been a professional endurance sports coach with Carmichael Training Systems for eight years. His coaching philosophy centers around taking the time that you have and adapting it into an individualized and science-based training plan that meets you where you are at. If you're interested in his personal coaching services, contact him at www.maddisonwrussell.com!

This month, Maddison is giving advice on building functional threshold power (FTP)!

Training to build FTP. In order to build your FTP, you will need to build in specific training where you will need to accumulate around 30-60 minutes of total time at intensity per session. Once you have your FTP set, you should be targeting a range of 95-100% of your FTP during these interval workouts. You should focus on a work-to-rest ratio of 2:1 during these sessions.

FTP workout planning: steady and progressive. As with most types of training, FTP workouts need to be progressed. When you are building both physical and mental strength, it’s important to keep things very attainable early on. A couple of example sessions you could start with are 4x8 minutes or 3x10 minutes at 95-100% of FTP.

As you get stronger and develop the ability to ride at FTP for longer periods of time, you will want to progress the interval duration and total time at intensity to continue to yield adaptations to FTP. Be careful when progressing these sessions and don’t ramp up too quickly. Try to focus on either progressing the number of intervals or duration of the intervals. So, for example you could progress a 4x12 minute interval workout to either 4x15, or 5x12 minutes. These are two different ways to increase your total time at intensity from 48 to 60 minutes.

Depending on your schedule, training phase, and level of experience you should look to complete 1-3 FTP sessions per week, or 30-180 minutes of total time at intensity per week. This is a very wide range, but a general rule of thumb is that the lower the volume you are doing, the larger amount of intensity you will need to do to see adaptations, so while you may only doing 60 minutes of total FTP work per week during a bigger volume phase, you may want to increase that to 90-120 minutes per week if you are crunched for time or don’t ride as much total volume.

Recovery during FTP training. Make sure that you leave time for recovery in between FTP sessions as well as structured recovery weeks every few weeks to let your legs come back to you and take advantage of the work you’ve put in. This also means avoiding unnecessary volume in between sessions. If you want to add training time, you should focus on adding it after you complete FTP workouts, and keep recovery days to short easy spins.