I didn’t spend too much time on the mountain bike in 2022. Mostly, this was a result of hunting for and getting a significantly better job. This both disrupted my schedule and meant I had to settle into something new, and it entirely consumed my competitive drive.
However, I did pick up something new and tangentially related to cycling in December 2021. I decided to train for a Kettlebell Sport event all the way in distant October 2022. My event of choice was Long Cycle, for a few reasons:
- It involved more than just doing the jerk event.
- I’m awful at kettlebell snatches.
- It has “cycle” in the name and I find that appealing.
I found some interesting benefits that carried over to mountain biking during the few outings I had this past year.
Disclaimer Up Front!
I don’t want to give any workout or weightlifting advice. There are enough people out there doing that, and a tiny amount of it is actually useful. I’m not interested in contributing to the pile of questionable advice. What I am interested in is giving an impression of my experience in case it is useful or interesting, somehow.
Cardio
I thought I had pretty good cardiovascular fitness. After all, I’ve been riding for the better part of a decade and doing a few races here and there in that time.
Routine Long Cycle work disabused me of that notion very quickly.
I can only imagine this is because it’s difficult to get used to having weight hang off you. In the years I’ve spent cycling, I believe I’ve gotten used to pedaling a bike around. I also find it difficult to push myself on a bike when I’m riding all alone because, being honest, it’s simply not any fun.
With that in mind, there is something fundamentally different with regard to training for kettlebell sport. Riding a bike around is a fun activity even if you’re not intending to train for a race. But there really isn’t any super fun way to pick up a kettlebell over and over. This means that you shift your focus from enjoying the activity to enduring the activity. The reward instead comes from finishing the workout. The implication is that you have no choice but to further build out your cardiovascular capability.
Strength
I’m not here to try to argue that cycling is a strength sport because it obviously isn’t. With that in mind, being stronger sure does make for a better experience on the bike, in general. I found that being stronger made climbing easier and that was pleasant. Further, I found that I just felt generally better on the bike, as though it was easier to keep myself upright and control the bike.
However, getting stronger is a great segue into the most useful realization I had.
Goals
Prior to February 2019, I hadn’t done any weight training at all. I picked it up as something to do over the winter and figured that it would probably help keep some fitness without the usual slog on the trainer. Getting more serious at the end of 2021 caused me to reexamine my goals.
Given that I’m never going to be a professional cyclist, it doesn’t make any sense for me to attempt to emulate the training of a professional cyclist. That sort of work might make me faster, but it might also burn me out on cycling. There’s nothing quite like emulating all the work of a job with none of the expected rewards.
As I spent more time under the kettlebells, doing as much Long Cycle as I could reasonably recover from, I started to realize that a much better goal (for me) is to be generally fit. Getting in the right shape for kettlebell sport had a lot of carryover for the bike, but I also found it benefited me greatly in just living.
The Takeaway
Previous articles have strongly suggested that I’m not much of a wintertime rider. That hasn’t changed, and it’s unlikely to change. But being able to keep myself in shape for the other three seasons, and actually make gains on my fitness over the winter, is extremely valuable.
I figure it keeps well with the name, as well, because the point is to lift those things gradually faster so you can get more reps in over the ten minutes of a competition.
Gradually Faster 