Lance Armstrong

By Chris Carmichael

I could get used to training camps in Hawaii in January. Back home in Colorado the high today was 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Here in Hawaii it was nearly 80 degrees, with temperatures reaching into the 90s in some areas. Lance is fired up, too. He’s excited about the new Radioshack team, his conditioning, and the possibilities that 2010 hold.

 

Before I got here I knew Lance was in good shape, but with our different travel schedules I hadn’t seen Lance in nearly two months. As soon as we headed out for a ride on the first day I was here, it was immediately clear that his conditioning is right on target.

First hour of Lance's ride.

 

Everyone knows there’s a cumulative impact from training and racing, so it’s not too surprising that Lance is in better shape in January 2010 compared to January 2009. He has a complete season of racing and training in his legs again, including the Tours of California, Italy, and France. He’s leaner, stronger, faster, and more flexible than at this point last year.

2.5 hours into the ride.

 

In addition to taking advantage of the great weather and big climbs near Kona, Hawaii, for long hours of riding, Lance has been spending time working with new technologies and techniques. Sports scientist Allen Lim and Dr. Stacy Simms from Stanford University are here working with Lance on strategies for managing core temperature, and the results are very promising. Allen also has some great ideas about hydration and nutrition, some of which he used with Team Garmin and some that are new. He’s an impressive sports scientist and I think he’s going to be a great asset to Lance and the entire Radioshack team.

 

Innovation has always been a cornerstone of Lance’s training, and one of the common threads that unite the people who have been working with him for a long time is that we’re all eager to find, evaluate, and implement new ideas. Over the past 20 years I’ve learned that in the pursuit of maximum performance – in any endeavor, be it athletics, business, or science – there’s little benefit to being provincial or territorial. When I was at USA Cycling in the 1990s, I brought in sports scientists to help the coaches and riders take advantage of new technologies. At the time, that meant supplemental oxygen training, altitude training, and the first trips to the wind tunnel with the team pursuit squad. Fast forward to 2010, and having a sports scientist like Allen working with Radioshack is important for continuing to implement the newest information and technologies for optimizing performance.

3.5 hours into Lance's ride. I'm done, but he has quite a ways to go still.

 

January is a very good time for working on new technologies and techniques. The training Lance is doing is specific to climbing (4x 20-minute ClimbingRepeat efforts), time trialing (3x 10-minute time trial efforts), and overall endurance (4-6 hour rides), but his major racing goals are several months away. Experimenting with cooling strategies, time trial positions, and new equipment is best done when training goals are more general. As you get closer to big events and the training gets more and more race-specific, you don’t want to be experimenting and making changes.

 

It’s also important to remember that rider’s need time to adapt to changes to their position or eating and drinking habits on the bike. Working on these aspects of performance in January ensures that there’s plenty of time to monitor and evaluate the impacts of new ideas. For example, years ago we tried a time trial bike with a narrower bottom bracket in an effort to reduce aerodynamic drag. The wind tunnel testing data indicated that the narrower bike would be faster, but in practice it turned out that Lance couldn’t produce as much power over the course of a one-hour time trial effort on that bike. Fortunately, the testing was done early enough that there was time to get him back to full-speed on a normal-width TT bike before the Tour de France.

 

I’m feeling very optimistic about 2010. All the tools and resources that are necessary for Lance to have a great season are in place and running smoothly. He’s healthy, happy, excited and focused. I’ve been around the guy for 20 years, and when years start out like this one is, very good things often follow.

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Lance Armstrong and the rest of Team RadioShack were introduced at a special
dinner reception in Tucson, Ariz. on Dec. 10, 2009. read more

Team RadioShack participates in its first group ride at training camp.
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Lamce Srmstrong and RadioShack Team manager Johan Brunyeel field questions
at a press conference Dec. 9, 2009.
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By RUPERT GUINNESS
Originally Published in the December 2009 issue of SPORT&STYLE


Lance Armstrong is slouched in the beige leather seats of a private jet on a flight back to Texas. “Sometimes I am sick and f…ing tired of hearing cancer stories. But that is just because I am sick and f…ing tired of cancer. We ought to all be sick and tired of it. I would love to say I don’t have to go to any more hospitals any more.”

As Armstrong talks, his assistant, Mark Higgins, sits behind him, updating a schedule that mounts by the day. His girlfriend, Anna Hansen, is feeding their seven-month-old son, Max, with the help of a nanny. Armstrong keeps one eye on Max while chatting to me. Also on board is Dennis Cavner, a former chairman and current board member of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the non-profit Livestrong organisation that has raised more than $US350 million since its inception in 1997. Sport&Style was invited to join this round trip from the Texan capital, Austin, to the Colorado town of Durango to see how the seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor manages his life.

While clearly exhausted, he says this trip “was a simple one. We went out and back to one place. If you go to a hospital or a situation where you have cancer survivors, that weighs on your mind. It pulls it out of you. I have had situations where for no reason – it’s not like you stood up for 20 hours or rode your bike for seven – you stood for an hour and are devastated because it has taken an emotional toll. This wasn’t like that.”

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Team RadioShack to debut at Tour Down Under read more

Next year's Tour de France will take place in the Pyrenees in celebration of the first time the tour passed through the mountains 100 years ago.

In 1910 the tour passed through four of the most daunting Pyrenean Passes -- Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque with the Tourmalet, one of the toughest climbs in cycling to be scaled twice.

The 2010 Tour will start in Rotterdam, travel through Brussels and will spend the rest of the route mostly in France. 

Lance will be racing in the 2010 Tour with team Radioshack.

Read the full article.

Get the full route map.

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Three days after CTS Senior Coach Kate Gracheck raced at the 2008 Collegiate National Championships, and 6 days after turning 29, Kate was diagnosed with cancer. For two years Kate had been monitoring the size of a growing lymph node on her neck and alerting doctors to its presence. She was reassured that she was too healthy and too young to be concerned. Finally during her annual exam in 2008, a nurse practitioner took her golf-ball sized lymph node seriously and ordered a biopsy of the tissue.
 
Just as Lance Armstrong raced in the 1996 Olympics with cancer, Kate competed in the 2008 Collegiate National Championships with cancer. Kate raced on Sunday and had surgery to remove the lymph node the following Wednesday. Nine days after racing at a National Championship Kate Gracheck was diagnosed with Stage 1A Hodgkins Lymphoma. She had been living with cancer for 2 years at that point.

Kate’s family wanted her to return to California for treatment, but Kate wanted to keep her life as normal as possible. She wanted to continue coaching her athletes, counsel her clients (Kate is a therapist working on her Doctorate in Psychology) and hang out with her friends. So she stayed in Colorado Springs, CO, with the support of family who flew in for her treatments. On October 17th Kate started chemotherapy treatment at the Penrose Cancer Center. She responded well to treatment and after 12 weeks her body was cancer-free.
 
Kate’s success at fighting cancer is undoubtedly linked to her coping strategy throughout treatment. She was very angry at the cancer and took all of her anger out exercising. As a highly successful athlete, coach and scholar, Kate was accustomed to setting goals for herself. She approached treatment similarly and told an Oncology nurse that she was going to win a national championship within a year of her cancer diagnosis. Toward that goal, she remained as active as possible throughout her chemotherapy treatments She climbed The Incline - a 2000-vertical-feet climb in just one mile up and over old railroad ties. The average grade of the incline is 41% with the steepest portion at 68%. This is one of Colorado Springs’ toughest training arenas, where many an Olympian comes to work towards their Gold. Kate was climbing the incline in 42 minutes during chemo, while most “average” individuals don’t even make it to the top in an hour. She was, however, disappointed as she had been climbing The Incline in 32 minutes pre-cancer. In addition to The Incline, she ran the trails through the mountains west of Colorado Springs and she continued to train on her bike. Kate had to keep the intensity low throughout treatment, though, as her lungs were compromised from the chemo and her heart raced with any effort over a recovery pace.
 
Once Kate was discharged from chemo she traveled to California to visit her family. Even though her training during treatment wasn't overly strenuous, Kate saw that she |
was producing higher power outputs on the bike post-chemo than she had one year earlier. Being cancer-free made the lighter training load that much more effective and her higher power outputs post-cancer made her realize how much the cancer had been hindering her progress over the previous seasons. Kate was ready to get back to full-intensity training at that point, but she still had a session of radiation ahead of her.

Despite the rapid progress from diagnosis to remission, Kate’s doctors still recommended radiation treatment. So in January of 2009 Kate underwent 20 days of radiation. The radiation took a lot out of her - she said she felt like she was “hit by a Mack truck.” Her energy levels were very low and she was unable to remain as active as she was during chemo. However, after radiation was over, Kate’s energy levels returned, and in March of 2009 Kate was once again training like the track star she was before cancer, with her sites set on achieving her goal of winning a Stars-and-Stripes jersey within one year of her cancer diagnosis. And since Kate turned 30 during her treatment, she was now eligible to race Masters National Championships.
Beginning with some moderate intensity and low gearing workouts to build her strength and refine her pedaling cadence, Kate grew stronger and more powerful with every passing week. She could only handle intensity every other day, but she was still able to ride 6 days per week, 3 days of intensity and 3 days of endurance/recovery. Each ride was meticulously planned out to prevent her from wasting valuable energy. Her training plan consisted of very focused intensity and recovery blocks, ensuring that Kate never became too tired because she was unable to bounce back from too much overload. Using her energy wisely, she was able to focus on strength work on the bike and then move to higher intensity training just before Masters Nationals.
 
A typical training week for Kate looked like this:
 
Monday- Easy Ride
Tuesday Track Race
Wednesday-Recovery Miles
Thursday- Track Race
Friday- Recovery Miles
Saturday- 4x2k efforts, 3 1 lap standing starts
Sunday- 2 hour Endurance Ride
 
Kate’s gradual buildup in training volume and intensity worked exceedingly well. In the weeks leading up to Masters National Championships, she was riding stronger than she ever had in the five years she’d raced before her cancer diagnosis. Taking another cue from Lance Armstrong, particularly from his recent return to professional cycling after a short retirement, Kate attributes her new-found strength and success (at least in part) to her 6 months of “recovery” after 5 years of racing. While chemotherapy and radiation treatment can hardly be considered recovery, it’s also significant to note that Kate was not pushing her body on the bike the same way she had for the previous five years. Lance Armstrong retired for nearly four years following a 15-year career as a professional cyclist, and the extended mental and physical recovery period served him well during his comeback in 2008-2009. Similarly, Kate’s 6-month hiatus allowed her to fully recover from the accumulation of 5 years of training stress and her 2 years living with cancer. Kate had built up a strong base over the years, and when she was free and clear of cancer and able to handle focused efforts, “it all came together.” During the 2009 US Master’s National Track Championships in Colorado Springs, CO, Kate earned her Stars-and-Stripes jersey. Less than a year after being diagnosed with Stage 1A Hodgkins Lymphoma, Kate Gracheck stood atop the podium as Masters National Points Race Champion in the 30-34 age group, and a Masters National record holder in the team pursuit event.

Perhaps the note she sent to the rest of the CTS Coaching Staff  sums is it up best:
“Most people never have to face cancer, and most people never win a National Championship, and I did both in the same year!” –Kate Gracheck

Chris Carmichael
www.trainright.com

You can follow me at www.twitter.com/trainright

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- sent from Cb's ever-present Blackberry...





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Today is Lance's 38th Birthday! Make sure to wish him a  happy birthday via twitter @lancearmstrong or on facebook! read more