The season here in CT is a bit wonky and we don’t have any official races in our series the entire month of November and then only one in December. Only 5 total races I like to ride road a lot in the spring/summer and am wondering if it would be alright to start the offseason plan after our second to last race (October 29th) and sneak in the December 4th race while on the offseason training plan, or should I just wait until after that race to start? Also, I am cat 5 so the races are only 30 min, if that plays into this at all.
My main reasons for asking are:
That offseason plan is loooooong and I’d like to be done earlier rather than later so that I can at least get back onto sweet spotting on the group rides that start up in March.
I don’t know what to do with myself at all during the month of November so after the two weeks off I thought I could start this? Again, I do not know what I am doing.
If the CX race result is not important to you and the races you would do in the spring are more important then you could 100% just start the offseason now and just do the race on the weekend for fun. Nothing wrong with that. However, ideally that weekend does not line up with a hypertrophy week. Just because that is when you will be the most sore making the racing very hard.
If you waited till after December 4th you would be nearly into summer before finishing the ‘off season’ plan.
You are right the offseason plan is long! 2 weeks post season break, 3 weeks fall foundation (which you could skip since you did cross this fall), then 10 weeks of resistance training and 16 weeks of base training. So at minimum you would like to have 18 - 20 weeks before your first C race even.
Everything depends on your racing schedule. I would absolute start with 1 week off at least for a post season break. Then you could start with 10 weeks resistance training. After that is when you would your base and ideally you would do at least 8 weeks. You could do the 16 weeks of weights plus base and add on sweet spot 3. Or for value could get the offseason plan and look to do the 10 weeks of weights with the first 8 weeks of sweet spot work before starting an interval plan.