Team Time Trialing with Ed Sassler

Team time trial is about three things:

1) Short duration efforts ABOVE your own anaerobic threshold

2) Repeated recovery

3) Paceline technique

Working on the team time trial is like building a house, first you get the building materials, then you start building - it's doesn't work well the other way around. Parts 1 & 2 are the building materials, part 3 puts everything together. The team members each have their own riding schedule that must fit into their lives, the hard part is getting the whole team together for part 3, parts 1 & 2 can and should be worked on by the individuals first.

Part one is part of the basic concept of a team time trial or any paceline - a group of riders can go faster than a single rider. This means riding harder than you can sustain - training below your anaerobic threshold is training for an individual time trial (because you could stay up front
all day long).

Part two is the key element to a good TTT. Individual training has more to do with shortening recovery time than anything else. Being in a fast paceline means working hard at the front, pulling off and resting while you rotate back up. It's a constant cycle of anaerobic effort followed by recovery in the aerobic range, all supplied by head wind and drafting.

Part three is where the whole team comes together to work on the techniques and sort out the strengths of the riders and their positions. The key to the fastest time trial is constant speed, this means the pace line goes the same speed if the fastest or slowest rider is on the front. The way to make that work is to figure out relative strengths and assign pull lengths to each rider. If rider A is stronger than rider B her pulls are longer, not faster. Constant speed also means no gaps in the paceline. When a gap forms in the line and the front person moves off it takes time for the next person just to get to the front. There's nothing gained by this extra work, they are pulling into the wind just to catch back up to where they should have been. If this is the case of a rider taking short pulls they may find themselves in trouble before they even clear the wheel of the person who pulled off in front of them. Know who's behind you and never block people in at the front. Practice with the same people in the same order means you should be comfortable riding right on the wheel in front of you.

Now let's get to the real issue - training for the TTT. This is where I switch to indoor training on a resistance device that you control the resistance either by gearing or with a control for the resistance device itself. The work in a paceline is a constant series of anaerobic efforts followed by aerobic rest intervals, this is very hard to recreate while training outdoors without the team, but can be simulated indoors very well. The workouts are simple, first you find the resistance/RPM point where you can't sustain constant output for more than 60 seconds - we'll call this your AT (it's probably not, but it's close enough to start with). Because the intervals of work and rest are going to be short, a heart rate monitor isn't going to give a clear picture by itself. The workout is a long series of 30 second efforts above your AT followed by 90 second efforts below your AT. As a general starting point I would say go 10% above and 10% below - you don't want the total difference to go beyond 30% because we're talking about the difference in effort between drafting and pulling.