I would like to take the audacity to share my experience with TD, especially with Coach Jack so far. But first I am going to put in context for those who will take the time to read this so that it can be better understood.
I am 42 years old, with a wife and a daughter, I work full time as an engineer and one week a month on night shift, so I am an average person with daily responsibilities and inconveniences like any other.
I have been training consciously for about 6 years and like any other I started gradually, a lot of reading and information about it. In the search for a correct way to train, I tried many training platforms (the best known and not worth mentioning), in them I did not feel fully comfortable since I saw that what I had read and what sports science said it didn’t match what I was running in training or just didn’t suit that form of training.
So I gave Coach Jack a try because his description and the topics covered in the forum were more in line with what I had learned. From November 2021 I started the full plan for a two-day MTB competition in mid-2022.
The PCM graphics looked good:
It’s 3 months of Base so far, training with a lower intensity than what I was used to in recent years, and I’m not going to deny it, it feels strange because we have etched in our minds that the harder we improve, the famous "No pain, no Gain”, this is not entirely true and at a certain point it makes us worse physically and psychologically.
However, I followed the plan which is really comfortable to do, to my surprise I found that I was barely in the base phase and I had already improved almost all my power curve compared to the previous year. Here are the numbers for those who, like me, like metrics (I weigh 54 Kg, I’m 1.65 cm tall):
4.11 W/kg FTP en Base Phase, so there are a lot of possibilities to improve this number.
I also did a check-up in a famous escalation here in Colombia, La Catedral, perhaps that name sounds familiar to some since it is where the infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar was imprisoned 20 years ago. Today it is a care center for the elderly with a beautifully landscaped road of approximately 6 km at 11% on average.
I managed to make a PR by going down 30 seconds, which I had not been able to improve since 2020 even in my best peaks of form. This time I improved it and I’m only in the base period.
I want to be honest and I don’t want to create false expectations about Coach Jack. As I have said before, this is not achieved only by training on the bike, I made many changes that I will list:
- Switch to Coach Jack
- I changed my training schedule, before I trained when I got home from the office, now I train first thing in the morning before leaving for work.
- When training first thing in the morning, I now do it on an empty stomach (fasting). I think this point is one of the ones that has made me improve the most because of the positive physiological adaptations it has, one of them being energy efficiency. I also do the long weekend workouts on an empty stomach eating properly during the training. This is a long topic and I would give for a full post about it.
- Strengthening and Core properly.
- Improved sleep hygiene and relaxation.
- Food and hydration more aware. Adequate sports supplementation.
Also for this to be effective you must be consistent, you must have fun on the bike both indoors and outdoors.
Training is a complicated and very individual issue, what works for some may not work for others and each person, based on trial and error, will have to prove what is best, but there is something that is certain and that is that there are some methods that may be more optimal than others.
I hope that this text has been of some use to those who are training and if they have any concerns about it or expand on any topic I can give my opinion.
Cheers,
Meaning improving your W’ while doing base training? This is a dream story for CJ. Once I coached a guy that was 75 and won his state championship for his age group. I told Andrea this and he said sounds like you got lucky and got a good student. So it’s not about the coach, it’s mostly about the student. Sounds like you have great genetics. I would love to hear what your VO2Max is. But fingers crossed, sounds like it could be an amazing year for you.
