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@youramericanlover held hands with me at the NYD Madison Cross a few years back, so he has racing history.
If I was doing an 8 week plan, I'd split it into two four-week blocks and focus on three main areas:
- aerobic fitness
- vo2 max
- tekkerz
Depending on how much time you had, I'd do 3 fitness sessions a week and 1 skills session, plus a longer ride if you have time.
In the first block I'd focus on aerobic fitness, so 10/15/20 minute efforts with recovery between them. Start short and build up to 2x20 minutes in the third week. Then have an easy week.
The second block will have more focus on vo2 max, so 2-3 minutes at the highest intensity you can hold, short recovery and repeat up to 5 times. Two of those a week, plus one aerobic session.
On the skills side, and remember you can't throw fitness at a skills problem, I'd focus on transitions on and off the bike, slow speed cornering and faster cornering.
- aerobic fitness
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andyp
Zones/% FTP are about the same thing right? What you're doing is "working at a capacity that is a % of your maximum". (I'll wait for someone to pop up and tell me "well, actually damo")
I think the key thing to think about here is:
have you raced cross before? will you need to factor in those sort of skills ?(I have terrible tekkers on everything. I don't work on any of it. Even when I "trained" with the great AndyP. Mostly, I was counting down the time till it was time to go the pub. I did manage to nail bunny hopping between two barriers one night. And that was my greatest moment ever. Thanks for coming to my TeDCXtalk)
however many sessions you do, don't forget to rest.
plan on running as well.
Whatever you do, you're going to find the races really busy.
You'll need to work on these things:
If you're lucky enough to get gridded: sprinting like mad from the start and staying there for longer than is comfortable. Staying at close to maximum, with what feels like randomly placed moments of really hard effort, getting off the bike, getting back on, sprinting, going close to maximum. repeating.
So your training should replicate that.
If you're not lucky enough to get gridded: you need to work on chatting to your neighbours, working out who you can and can't push past physically, whether you want to sprint from the start when you can see it's fucking carnage at the first obstacle, sprinting after the first obstacle and playing essentially mario kart on bikes.
So your training should replicate that.
1 mixed interval session of 5 x 3 vo2 max things / 1 longer sweet spot interval session
1 bike ride in the mud session
1 30:30:30 session
1 running session
1 chatting session
1 washing bike session
1 paralysis by set up choice session (tubs, tubeless, latex clincher), (1 x10, 1x11, 2 x10, 2x11, single speed), (discs - hydro, discs - mechanical ,v brakes, cantis)