Marc Collard
When it comes to making decisions, I’m the type of person who could stand in the grocery store staring at unit prices as I agonize over which pasta to get. Do I want the store brand? Is the bulk size a better value? Am I missing the best choice of them all? If you’re like me, this sounds familiar. This is a trivial decision. Thirty cents here and there isn’t going to change my life, I know this, but I still equivocate.
Recently, a major part of my life has become very clear to me. This is my training. Not only was my decision all but made for me, it is one that I have faith in and have found a tremendous peace with. My training has a distinct focus; it will make me faster.
I had been a mountain bike racer as a junior and had a fair amount of success. This success continued into my first two years of college as a mountain biker and then on the road. After those 9 years of racing I became a bit tired and felt disheartened with where my cycling was going. So I put all of my focus on cross-country running, which I had done in high school. Being in Maine, I was a big fish in a small pond (athletically speaking) and began surprising myself with both results and times.
After two years of competitive running and high mileage, I ran into serious problems with my feet and had to give up the idea of being a runner. My right foot had gotten so bad I needed to have a major surgery to correct the damage running had done to my foot. The recovery seemed miraculous at first, but seemed to stay in the “almost better” condition for quite some time. Running was out of the question so I returned to cycling to keep both my sanity and fitness.
At the same time I got back into cycling I got into graduate school at UC Davis. My riding was coming along nicely even though it lacked structured training. Between graduating and starting graduate school I had the opportunity to spend an entire month in Mons, Belgium and the mountains of France. Needless to say the culture, the riding, and watching Le Tour had me stoked with desire to race bikes again.
Once in Davis I was pleasantly surprised to find myself surrounded by a wealth of talented cyclists and a vast cycling community. Although I was a masochistic mountain biker at heart and seemed quite unorthodox, I found a couple of welcoming teams that are closely linked; the UC Davis Aggies and the Davis Bike Club. The Davis bike club afforded me access to the legendary.
Before I went to see Dr. Testa I had imagined a withered and gray old man; some sort of mad scientist. The mental image that I was working with was along the lines of Rocky’s Micky; an eccentric sage who would be the center of attention with all his boisterous and histrionic ways. What I found was the total opposite. Dr. Testa is a calm yet vibrant man who is very kind and personable. He also happens to be one of the world’s finest cycling doctors, but you would never know it because he makes you feel like you are the most important person there.
What Dr. Testa does is so much more than focus on me, he works in a very professional way to help me design my training. He doesn’t pull a magical rabbit from a top hat and give me the talent of an Ullrich, the sprint of a Cipollini, or the heart of an Armstrong. What he does do is give certainty to my training.
In his office, his right hand man Judd Van Sickle (coach of the NCCA national champion UC Davis Aggies) gets cyclists set up on their own bikes with three key components. There is a trainer that holds the bike and allows for controllable resistance on the rear wheel, a heart-rate monitor (just like the Polar one everyone wears), and a breathing tube that goes in ones mouth and has sensors to analyze the exchange of gasses. Once set up there is even a great view of a small park, which helps to reduce the clinical feel.
The “test” itself is straightforward. A rider may be weak, a rider may be a Giro d’Italia winner; in either case the result is the same: the machine wins. An initial level is set and resistance is increased every minute or two (depending on the type of test) by constant increments. Eventually the body falters and the test stops. Then the legs are spun out for a while as your packet is assembled.
Before leaving, the athlete (who may be the recreational cyclist next door or Stefano Garzelli) sits down in Dr. Testa’s small and simple office and gets feedback on the test results. A very scientific result is shown via graph or data table and then explained in simple English. After the commenting on results, individualized advice is given on how to increase performance. The advice can range from diet to specific workouts to reduce a deficiency. For everyone the result is the same, a plan to get better; and there it is, the decisions have been made.
To many my dreams seem a bit lofty, to me they are straight forward goals. I want to win races, big races. I want to win “free and clear” with my hands raised and I am willing to put in the hours of structured suffering that it will take. I am also patient and know that although I have already moved from a new road racer to a 3 license in just one half of a season, that isn’t my goal. I want to keep progressing and doing things that make people shake their heads say, “how did he do that?” Of course a stars and bars jersey and some stage race wins would give me some validation along the way to the classics.