For a long time I've been uneasy about the warmup generally recommended for sprint events.  Tradition states that the shorter the race, the longer the warmup. I've seen some VERY silly long warmups, one particular one at the Oceanias last year, this one bloke must have done a 4 hour warmup for a kilo, every time I walked by, he was on the rollers, or doing efforts on the track or an ergo etc ... by the time he started, he was knackered ... but OCD sillyness aside, the warmup for a sprint event is one that I think we can optimise and there's much room for variation and experimentation.  Some recent research from the University of Calgary cropped up this week that is of interest.

I don't have access to the published paper yet, so can't comment on the method or the quality of the research, so take this as unqualified conjecture from a reading of the abstract :

Shorter, less intense warmups seem to be producing better performances in sprint events.

This makes intuitive sense to me.  I don't really buy into the whole "you need a big warmup to prime the aerobic system", yes, you need to get your muscles and joints warm and some activation to turn on your nerves, but how much?  I think there's a lot of room here for individual sprinters to experiment with their warmups prior to competition, I don't think one size fits all here, not one bit.  Watching elite sprinters warm up, they all do it differently, and many of them do not do very much at all.

For a long time I've been a champion of the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine ergo.  I think I own 6 of them?  It's got a stonkingly heavy flywheel which makes it good (ok, at least, viable) for standing start and acceleration work, which sprinters need.  It's not without issues - the main one being tyre slip under heavy torque - ie: Those standing starts that we want to train on it.  It's issue is that it uses a roller drive, and we can work around that with skateboard deck tape (lasts around 5-10 starts depending on the rider) and it does eat tyres.  We can mate it up to a road powertap and get power and torque (sorta) from it, which is good too.  They're also pretty quiet (fluid), unlike wind trainers.

But ... it's roller driven.  A direct drive would be better, without doubt.  Of course, to do this, would mean that the powertap wouldn't be any use, so we'd lose our data.  Bugger ... We could use SRM's, if we had a huge budget, alas, not this week!

The other good trainer is the BT Ergo, which is a direct drive wind trainer.  It's bulky, it's very expensive and it has next to no inertial load (no flywheel) so it's not good for training acceleration (great for constant power etc, but not for sprint work where we want to target acceleration).   It, being direct drive, does not suffer from wheel slip though (although, since it has no significant flywheel, that's not really an issue with it anyway!). There's a power-based trainer or two around as well, the Computrainer is probably the most famous of them, but it's not a sprinters trainer.  And the AIS's Wombat, the VIS's Godzilla etc (custom made jobbies, with uber-flywheels and SRM's and a big budget to put them together!)

Here's a new player on the block (thanks to Scott McGrory, we had a brief chat about it yesterday at DISC). It's the Lemond Revolution.  Direct drive (no slip) and a flywheel.  We lose out on power measurements with it, at least at the moment, but it might be worth a play - I will see if I can get one to add to the collection of trainers I have, to see if it can fill a niche in our sprint ergo program.  If the flywheel has enough mass and we gear it up right it might be a valuable tool.

As I mentioned in a blog entry last week, I only did the flying 200 (rode a reasonable time, considering, 13.05, not that far off my PB), the team sprints and the keirin (I was rubbish in the keirin!  Totally pissweak effort! anyway ....)

At the end of the night I was asked for some feedback.  Here it is :

Do flyng 200's every time to start and grade everyone - these are an important sprint discipline and practicing them (and racing them!) is important.  Do them over the full 3.5 lap distance, not 2.5 laps.  It's what we train for, and how we race.  The juniors whop are along to have fun should get exposed to this properly.

Team sprints - we did them in teams of 2 (good) but with the fastest and slowest combined, second fastest with second slowest and so on.  This meant that it wasn't really a race and the kids felt bad for holding up the seniors they were teamed with, despite our best efforts to encourage them.  They did learn, but I'd suggest we do two team sprints - one like this, and one graded with nominated teams that we can be a bit more serious about.

Keep the keirins, and keep them at the end of the night.  To give the sprinters time to recover, run scratch races between the sprints for enduros (or enduros that want to also sprint, go for it guys ... who needs recovery?!).

If numbers are low, match sprints, if numbers are high, more keirins.

I'm focussing a lot of us older guys who train in the Sprint Squad on legspeed and power at higher cadences, one way to do this is to do a motorpaced drill called a "windout", where, on a small (or at least, not a big gear) gear we follow the motorbike through a flying 200 windup, then a flying 200 entry line, chase the bike for a set number of laps while it speeds up at every corner.  This doesn't use up our power getting to speed so it saves us for high cadence high power work, where we rarely get to train without the aid of a motorcycle (or, on the road, down hills).  Last night our main drill was a 500m windout with the motorbike pulling off at 100m to go, the rider then has to try and accelerate (or, at least hold speed) for the last 100 meters.

That's what it looks like from the back of the motorbike ...

Here's my power meter data for one of my efforts from this session (I did 4 of them, all on 90").  As you can see, I am not very fast or powerful (and am even worse than I was last summer, but I have some mittigating circumstances!  Injury has taken quite a toll this year so far, but I am on the mend!). Compare this to the week before, where we just did windouts without the motorbike pulling off at 100 to go (ie: chasing all the way in the draft).  The power at the last 10 seconds is the interesting part.  Here's the charts :

	500m windout with rider unassisted for the last 100m
	500m windout with draft to finish

And here's the last month or so's overall power figures (it's a funny slice of a graph!)

  It's a long way down from my best (~1550 watts peak), but it is going up, and that's encouraging.  This is all post my back injury that dropped my peak power down to the sort of numbers an enduro would sneer at! (800 watts!  You must be joking!) ... As long as it keeps going up, as are my lifts in the gym, slowly but consistantly, I'm happy.  I have abot 5 months to get some speed before the next Summer Sprint Series.  Keep on trucking.

aboc, ie: me, is sponsoring this; Blackburn's running five sprint nights at DISC over "winter".  The rough program is this :

Flying 200 for grading.

1.5 lap dashes (4 riders at a time I think)

Team sprints (graded by your f200, not able to nominate your own team - this is still being 'discussed', I am not happy about not being able to nominate my own team or starting order).  These at least will be no longer than 3 laps (they originally wanted 4 laps, huh?  What 'team sprint' has 4 laps? And then expects the poor bugger that rode 4th to race again in 15 minutes?!)

1k handicap, held start, no push (The kilo is dead, no-one trains for it anymore ... why is this in the program?  To embarras sprinters?)

Scratch races for the leftovers

If there's enough time, keirins to finish.

I will only be racing the F200, team sprint (assuming an acceptable team and I'm lead rider) and the keirin, assuming the program doesn't have to be cut short because there's too much going on.  The other stuff is just silly and I'm not doing it.

Those of you who were at the last round of the SSS will know that the above is not what I planned, but since I'm not running this, it is what it is and it's better than a night of scratch, points, h'cap and/or motorpaces. It's a start.  If it's a bit successful, we can lobby to make it different for later rounds or next year etc.

So that's tonight's festivities at DISC.

I've been pretty busy with the NTID squad and helping Hilton for the last few weeks, as well as coaching in the 'Haus a lot, running Spin, Sunday DISC sessions, and that's my excuse for not writing much here in May.  I have loads ot writing to do for The Book too ... lots of gaps to fill!

No-one wants to pay to read this (why would you?!) and no-one clicks on the Adsense adverts I had on it.  So, they're gone!

I hate 'em too ...

How do most people get started in a sport?  Usually it's at school, or you get invited by a few friends to join a team etc.  Most of the 'sharp' sports (Olympic or other elite level, football, criocket etc) get their talent young, at schools or by blind luck and co-incidence.  Then there's everyone else who maybe missed that boat.

Why did you start riding your bike?  Most of the people I speak to (and after almost a decade of coaching, that's quite a large sample) started out wanting to get fit.  They're mostly older (not juniors, most of my coaching clients have been masters age or mid 20's starters), mostly got a bike, went off and rode Beach Road, did maybe a few things like the Bay in a Day or the Alpine Classic (or wanted to but didn't think they could). They saw Glenvale, got interested and had a go (it's easy to start with crits).  Kids do it a bit differently, maybe it's a school around the bay program, or they pick it up from their parents, who maybe raced or are racing.

What do they do? Endurance racing.  It's all endurance.   Crits, 90% of track racing (certainly Blackburn's track program is endurance based, I expect most other clubs do the same or similar), road racing ... everyone's doing endurance.

The same thing with running, there may be a few sprint races at schools and a couple of the fast kids go off and get popped into little aths or similar if they're lucky enough to have a PE teacher who notices and is well enough connected to get them started, but everyone does the cross-country run, adults train for half marathons or triathalons.  Who trains for sprints?  Who even thinks they could?  Very few people, in my experience.

I want to change this.  I want sprint to be big.  I want YOU to have a go, and if you've got kids, to have your kids exposed to sprint. It's the pointy end of the sport and it is not inaccessable.  We're making more sprint races, we run a sprint series, we want YOU to have a go.