The limiting factor
Since I had been considering Leadwoman and the need to get better riding MTB, I knew I would have to do some training indoors through the winter and not wait until April when the weather was better like I pretty much did last time. As I mentioned before, I had reached out to Madison Flowers in October to train at his studio, otherwise known as ‘The Cave.” I’m not sure why they shortened it from the Pain Cave. It took a few months, but between Madison, John Grogan and getting a bike fit with Craig Fulk, we were able to get a trainer set up for me to do A LOT of climbing on my mountain bike indoors. I’m sure Madison could explain it better, but we had to cut down one of the metal pieces that secures the bike on the computrainer because my MTB was too wide for it. This is after I got a rear wheel built from Brandon at Bike’s Inc. Fort Worth and ordered a special skewer for it to fit on the trainer. It worked! My first ride on the trainer was 12/26/18. It was weird. I got shin splits for several weeks until my body figured out what was going on. By this time, I had stopped weight training (simply because the
My first trainer ride
times didn’t work out for my schedule), but I was heavy into aerial yoga and doing some strength exercises at home. I ended up training at the cave every single week. I think I only missed 2 workouts because of my travel schedule and 1 because of female issues. We (Madison and I) learned a lot about MTB training indoors. The FTP test I took didn’t seem to translate well into the training that I needed to be doing. It took a while to figure that out. In the beginning, I worked on strength for climbing. Low RPM, high power.
