Back from altitude

Jenson Young has spent the biggest training block of his season on his own in the Sierra Nevada. He flies home on Monday with Nationals and the Europeans to come.

Altitude blocks look good from the outside. Mountains, sun, a bike, nothing else to think about. The reality is a small apartment, a lot of rice and the same climb ridden so many times you stop noticing it. Jenson has been out there training alone, and he landed back in the UK on Monday 10th August.

They are deliberately boring. Up early to get the work done before the heat, ride, eat, sleep through the afternoon, eat again, bed by half nine.

“You settle into it fast,” he says. “There is nothing to decide. I know what I am doing on Tuesday because it is the same thing I did last Tuesday.”

The heat is what catches people out. By eleven there is no useful training left in the day, so everything happens early and the afternoon belongs to a fan and a dark room.

Somewhere around the middle of a block the novelty runs out and the tiredness turns up, and almost every rider describes the same slump.

“You feel slow, and you are slow,” he says. “Your numbers drop, that’s what’s expected; they are meant to drop, but that does not help much when you are halfway up a climb wondering whether you have wasted three weeks.”

The evenings are the other half of it. There is only so long you can be on a video call to home before you are just describing what you had for dinner.

The climb everyone asks about is the Pico Veleta, one of the highest paved roads in Europe, and it starts more or less at the door of the apartment. It finishes well above 3,000 metres, where every breath carries around a third less oxygen than it does at home.

“It is not hard the way a short steep climb is hard,” he says. “It just does not stop. You are an hour in and still nowhere near the top.”

None of this is about being quick in Spain. The point of a block is what happens two or three weeks after it, when the body has made the adaptations, come back down to sea level and found it has a bit more to give.

“You do not come home flying,” he says. “You come home tired, and then if you have timed it right it turns up later, when you need it.”

That timing is aimed at Nationals and the European Championships, which is the entire reason for spending a summer on a mountain on your own.

He landed back in the UK on Monday with a bag of washing, a massive training file for Ben (Ben Thomas his coach) and about a fortnight before any of it counts. We will be following the run-in on Instagram and Facebook.