Australian Cycling Forums - Bicycles Network Australia

Looking for some general tips and help on how to approach and train for a team pursuit in a very short time frame from a newb point of view, I know it's a very broad and varying question but what are some of the basics to keep in mind?

Just looking to avoid any rookie mistakes...

Length turns?
Roughly how much above power/hr threshold should you be pushing on your turns?
Do you have to finish with 4, a sacrificial lamb?
Should I go out and do 4k solo intervals for training?

Lay your wisdom upon me

Thanks

Start the slowest rider first.
Half lap turns and peel off just after the apex of the bend so you use less energy dropping back on.
Three to finish
Solo training over 4K is not the way to train, you need to train as a team.
Practice your standing starts.
Communicate with the others if you are spent and if you are do the hardest possible turn you can before pulling the pin.
Finish with nothing and I mean nothing in the tank = wobbly legs when you get off.

That will do you for a start!

Foo

You will need to work out your finishing order and how you will do it coming out of the home bend.
You need to be sitting around 25-75mm from the wheel in front.
If any of you are fading, get the strongest rider to do an extra long turn, even up to 2 laps if necessary.
You need to be training as a team at least two days a week and for a couple of hours a session.

There you go, some more headache for you.

Foo

Something somewhat related. What sort of gearing to people generally run in pursuits. I have a lot of trouble spinning fast and am wondering if it isnt too bad to just go huge.

It would depend on you ability Vander. We only rode 92.5 back when we rode and and that was with three of us being ranked Aces. I don't know what the equivalent is in todays rankings. (Elite something or other)

The thing is, you need to be all on the same gearing otherwise you are mismatched and that is the whole point of a Teams Pursuit.

If you are all matched closely in your abilities then possibly a 94-96 max but not knowing how strong or weak you are it is very hard to say.

Foo

Not sayin .... I'll prob have a couple of teams in

haha no its cool, what foo said.
Lots of standing start practise and swap off turns as a team at 80% pace. Run a smaller gear for practice.
Practise at DGV using the correct gear and all the wheels and helmets and stuff.
Team order is really critical. Start with a guy who is steady, not too quick out of the blocks. Practise going off the start and dropping onto each other's wheel. Easiest way to swing off is to just go straight ahead at the end of the back straight, go up high on the bank and turn down quickly. Don't sit up there. Straight up, straight down. Miss the last wheel and you are gooooone.
Strong riders do full lap turns, if you have a weak guy he just does half laps.

Gearing .... We won State Titles last year on 98, and nationals too but I cant remember the gear they used. 96 would be good for most teams. If you've never done one before, maybe 95?

Practice practice. Just swapping turns and staying close to the wheel in front. DGV is steep so you need to practise on it. You swing off and on quicker on the steep banking.

At the finish ...on turn 4 Rider 1 drifts up above the red line, rider 2 drifts up from black to red, and rider 3 comes inside on the black. Rider 4 doesn't count. If a rider blows during the event he needs to scream "Three" at the top of his voice so the other 3 know to swing up and back down faster. If they don't know he's gone, they will drop down a bikelength back and then its race over. You cant make up a bikelength at 50kph out of the draft.

I will be organising dedicated Team Pursuit training sessions on Sunday mornings during February at DGV in the lead up to NSW champs.

It's costing a bomb to hire the track exclusively, so I'm hoping for some support from clubs. I will coordinate and supervise the session and provide assistance, tips, hints to any team that asks. Great chance to get rare clear track time to really practice team pursuit drills.

Once all validated, we'll advertise details via CNSW. I already have the track booked.

I've chosen a 9.30am start time to give a balance between starting late enough to allow out of towners enough time to get there, but not finish so late that you miss the rest of Sunday with significant others.

Alex Simmons/RST wrote:I will be organising dedicated Team Pursuit training sessions on Sunday mornings during February at DGV in the lead up to NSW champs.

Good man Alex. It was great last year. We will be there for sure.

Thank you all for the snippets of info, just about everything mentioned here we tried to implement and proved valuable stuff, unfortunately the team managed to squeeze in a grand total of 10mins training together before the race, we seemed to do allot better in that training session than on race day :/
Our eagerness came through and we went out a little bit beyond some of our limits in the initial laps and payed for it near the end, missing out on a bronze ride off by .5sec. I was somewhat happy with my physical effort, but not with my technical stuff, my legs were absolutely annihilated right after the qual and with a mouthful of spew in the last lap I do wonder how I would have coped in a 2nd race anyway.
All said and done a good learning experience against some ridiculously strong teams. Maybe TT bars and discs would have got us that .5! Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

You tried Crawf and that is the main thing!

Foo

Nice work Crawf. Re mouthful - I always scope out bin locations before racing...

Bars and discs would have more than likely helped, but only if you had practiced using them prior to the team pursuit.

dalai47 wrote:Nice work Crawf. Re mouthful - I always scope out bin locations before racing...

Bars and discs would have more than likely helped, but only if you had practiced using them prior to the team pursuit.

Yep that was the thinking, didn't want to throw in unused/untested equipment into a novice group, safety over ability