Monday, July 28, 2008

Adieu to the Tour de France for this year!


I hope you thought this Tour de France was as exciting as I did, and enjoyed bringing a little of that excitement into your classes. If this was the first time you've done this in your indoor cycling program, know that every year it will get easier, and you will have more experience to add every time you do it. Judging by the number of emails I received, there were a lot of first-time Tour watchers out there who have been creating stage profiles for their classes. They've commented about how much fun they've had as well as their students. This is very rewarding to me, and I hope that all of you reading this have enjoyed these posts for the past 3 weeks. (If so, let me know below by leaving a comment).

Don't think that your profiles have to be shelved for a year! You can do Tour de France rides all throughout the year - they are simply another fun and exciting profile to add to your repertoire. You now have some excellent, very real Race Day and Strength Energy Zone profiles from the time trial and Pyrenéean and Alpine stages.  Of course you also have Interval rides from your flat or rolling stages with a lot of attacks and recoveries, and the long flat stages sitting in the middle of the peleton are perfect Endurance Energy Zone profiles.

It's been very time consuming the past three weeks. Phew, I need a little break (just like the riders do after 3 weeks of racing)! I am going to go back to an average of once a week posts. You may want to subscribe to the Feed Reader (on the left side of the blog, near the bottom, the orange icon that says Feed Icon. Then you'll be given an option to subscribe to a feed reader such as Google, Bloglines, My Yahoo, etc. You'll be notified there when there are any new posts.

Or just put this link in your bookmarks or on your desktop and check back regularly for profiles, cuing and coaching tips, physiology, programming, and music ideas. I'll try to have profiles from guest instructors at least once a month (contact me if you have a great profile you would like to be considered). Remember to share this blog with all the instructors you know.

If you have any suggestions for content or something you would like me to discuss, please leave a comment. I appreciate any and all comments at any time, any post! All comments also appear in my inbox, so no need to email me as well.

Vive le Tour! 

(Note: the photo above is George Hincapie carrying the American flag on the Champs Elysée in Paris in 2005 after the 7th win by Lance Armstrong).

2 comments:

sandy said...

Jennifer, I certainly enjoyed reading your Tour posts, and it became a regular daily check-in along with Bicycling.com and the official "Tour" website. I especially love reading your "in person" details of what being there is like. Been on your travel site and dreaming....maybe someday!
Thanks for all the hard work!

Marc said...

Thanks for all the help with the tour! I used a lot of your information in my classes and they loved it. It was really fun to use the tour as our rides these past few weeks! Thanks again for all your info!

Heather Penrod