YOUR YEAR IN REVIEW Most people, not just athletes, really dread reviewing their past year. It is a good thing to do. In most jobs you have a review/assessment of your job performance, students have exams! For bike racers, the exam is your GOAL RACE. You exceed your goal and you get to have the option of staying in the same racing class or moving to a more competitive one! By the time you read this, Cyclocross season will probably have named its Champions for this year. Now is the time to take a break from your bike training and recharge your batteries, recover from a long season of road racing and Cyclocross that started in March. This a perfect time to review the past season. If you are feeling run down and dejected, do the review, but do not make decisions about next year for a month or so. Discuss it with your coach before you make radical changes. I suggest with a broad overview of all the good stuff first. Write it down!  Then add the stuff you think is your best opportunities for improvement. These will be the guideposts for this winter’s training. Some of the more analytical athletes will already have a list of “20 questions” to respond to for this review. Everybody will phrase these questions a little differently for themselves. To keep this article short (For those of you who know me, I can talk / write for hours) here are a few questions to help you along in your quest for your Peak Performance. 1 / Did you meet or exceed your Goal ( s ) this year? If you have more than one major goal answer each goal separately. 2 / What one aspect of this years training helped you achieve your goal? 3 / Did having more than one major goal help or hinder your ability to achieve your goal ( s ) ? 4 / Did you feel you Peaked early or late for your Goal event? 5 / Did you hold your Peak long enough? 6 / What part of your yearly plan worked the best? 7 / What part needs work? 8 / Did you have an “unscheduled” recovery phase because of tiredness, or injury? 9 / Did you keep a training log to help you do this review? 10 / Did your training log have the critical information to help you with these questions? There are many more questions or versions of these you can ask yourself, but you get the point. Now you need to set up an action list dealing the opportunities for improvement you have now uncovered. You may want to do this with your coach. You may also need to recharge and recover for a few weeks before you do this part as well. This action list will help you and your coach generate next year’s goals. These goals will structure your overall training plan for next year. Keep it simple. If you have exact dates for goal events, use them. They will anchor all the other minor events that are floating about the racing calendar at this point. At this point, you are using broad strokes to place when you need to train hard, train long, recover, and peak during the next season. The nitty gritty of exactly how to achieve this, will evolve out of this action plan. Examples of opportunities are: You felt like you ran out of gas. Questions you can ask might be: Did I do long enough LSD rides to prepare my body for the caloric expenditure of my goal event? To solve this one you need to know how many calories you expended for the goal race, (or calculate an estimate) add 10 % and go do LSD rides to consume that many calories. I have an athlete where we did this. Their race was 2,700 calories. When they checked their training log, they found they hardly ever consumed over 2,400 calories. Most were less than 2,000 calories. Their body got used to the idea of not spending more than 2,400 calories. When the race got interesting, their body said “we’re done now”. These very long LSD rides are critical to your success.