EPC TIPS: Training for Pacific and Southeast Championships

Rounds three and four of the XTERRA USA Championship Series takes us to beautiful Santa Cruz, California and is followed the next week by one of the best courses XTERRA has to offer in Pelham, Alabama. Both events present their own unique challenges and require slightly different aspects of fitness and technique. With a little less than a month before these two races, there are a few things you can do now to help you prepare for your best race.

The Santa Cruz course offers one of the few ocean swims on the XTERRA tour. The water will be cold and rough, so practicing your open water wetsuit swimming skills as much as possible between now and then will serve you well. While I don't know the exact course of the Santa Cruz race, you can expect the trails in Wilder Ranch to be mostly open rolling trails with several sustained climbs and longer descents. This should be more of a "fitness" course meaning the racers with the better aerobic fitness should prevail. Performing moderately long intervals just under race-pace will prepare you for the sustained efforts of the race. As always with XTERRA training, including hills in your training is key, so try doing the majority of your bike and run training on hills.

The following week's course in Oak Mountain State Park is quite the opposite from Wilder Ranch. The trails in Oak Mountain are quite technical and the racer with the best technical skills often prevails. Tight singletrack loaded with roots and rocks, twisting turns and short steep up and down climbs and descents make bike handling essential. Get on the mountain bike as much as possible while performing short, multiple repeats of efforts above race-pace with short rests to get ready for the constant accelerations required in Alabama. The run in Pelham is one of the hardest on the US Tour*. The first half lulls you into a fairly smooth rhythm, before dropping you on to a less traveled trail consisting of repeated steep climbs and steep descents. You must practice hills on the run before race day. A great session to include in your build up is one I took from Conrad Stoltz several years back I read in Triathlete Magazine. The run consists of 8 by 90 second hill repeats at race-pace (with jogging downhill recoveries), followed by 5 minutes on the flats at race-pace, followed with 8 by 30 second all-out hill repeats (walking downhill recoveries) and finally finish with another 5 minutes on the flats at race pace. This is a tough workout and I would guess Conrad had the Oak Mountain run course in mind when doing this session.

Take the next few weeks to practice the specific demands of your event to help you be as prepared as you can be to race your best. Don't forget to keep some longer endurance sessions in your schedule to maintain your base fitness you gained over the winter. During the final week of your event be sure to lighten your load by allowing some extra rest and recovery to set yourself up for a breakthrough performance.  See you in CA and AL next month!

- Cody Waite, EPC Multisport

*Note: The Pelham run will change in 2011, as the aforementioned "death climbs" have been replaced with just one big climb followed by a bunch of rolling lakeside singletrack.