by Melanie McQuaid

Racing a mountain bike is all about power. XTERRA racing requires big fat watts produced in short bursts followed by lung burning, uncomfortably long periods of hard, grinding watts between. Periodically there will be respite found in sections where the power output is interrupted by technical challenges that give your legs a chance to grasp at recovery while you focus on navigating the trails safely. It hurts quite a bit to race a mountain bike well because going fast off road is all about finding the fastest route from point A to point B (you have some options in singletrack) while doling out large efforts hoping that there will be enough left at the end to finish. Ideally, the finish line and your last reserves meet perfectly.

Conrad and I had a chance to visit the LA Tri Club on Tuesday and during that appearance someone asked the question “why XTERRA?”. My answer was that despite the fact we train professionally to be the fittest we could possibly be and take the competitive aspect of this race very seriously, the challenge of XTERRA is often the course itself. Your primary objective is finishing the race and your secondary objective is trying to win it. Sunday was a classic example of the most ridiculously hard race course and stacked fields of triathletes from a variety of backgrounds doing battle against the course first and then with one another.

by Melanie McQuaid

For the last many years that I have trained, first as a mountain bike athlete and more recently as an off road triathlete, I would put about 80% of my riding hours on a road bike. This came naturally as I have always done my interval training using a power meter, and up until 2008, I did not use a power meter on my mountain bike. The time I spent riding trails focused more on quality endurance and technical training.

This winter I started to employ the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Hub System off road. I have replaced one of my hill workouts with another off road workout on hills and have started the process of data collection and analysis to compare my ability in January to my hopefully improving ability in March. What is interesting is the comparison of the hill workouts done on the road to my hill workouts done on the mountain bike. I have no doubt that some of my observations can help me to better plan for these workouts and how to tailor my training program to better reflect what I am going to encounter racing. Many of these observations merely confirm what we already know are the differences between mountain bike racing and road racing. However, the actual quantification of these differences is of interest.

I woke up on Saturday January 20th thinking, screw it. I don’t feel like getting on a plane, I am just going back to bed for another few hours and later I will just get up and go suffer on another ride in the rain by myself. Luckily, Ross was making coffee so the thought of drinking some liquid motivation was more enticing than a few more minutes of nap time. I got on the plane, flew to LA, got a car and jetted to Temecula.