Sidelined for weeks due to a fracture, Ireland’s big GC contender tells stickybottle about his specific training routine.
By Shane Stokes
He’s had a season debut which was far from ideal but Eddie Dunbar has expressed confidence that he has retained much of the fitness which he built up over the winter. Dunbar crashed on his first day of competition this year, fracturing a bone in his hand on stage one of the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana on February 1st, and spent several weeks training indoors before undergoing an operation. He only returned to road training on March 16th, six weeks after his fall.
Dunbar has given an insight into what workouts he did during his time consigned to the indoor trainer, telling stickybottle that previous experience had taught him the importance of staying focussed.
Advertisement
“I’ve had a lot of setbacks now, in terms of crashes and illness and stuff like that. It’s weird. It is frustrating. You take a day or two to process it but once you process it, it is just easier to get on with it. It’s such a hard sport now and it’s gone to an incredible level. If you start feeling sorry for yourself, you fall behind pretty quick.
“I just kept thinking of the Giro in May and even the rest of the season. That gets you up in the morning and gets you into a good routine. Having that is really important.”
Following his move to Jayco AlUla over the winter, Dunbar is now working with the coach Alex Camier. They came up with a plan once he was injured, deciding the best approach to maintain and even advance his fitness.
“I had a routine going with Alex,” he explained. “It was three days on from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It was two hours on the turbo in the morning, an hour an evening. Sometimes that’d be two hours in the morning and an hour and a half in evening, depending on the session.”
He’d then take a rest day of sorts after that three day block before beginning again. That day off on Thursdays was not sitting around, but rather continuing to work in a different way.
“I could actually run with a splint on,” he said. “It was nice to get outside and exercise, that was just more of a mental boost. I’d go out on a rest day. I’d do like 30 minutes in the morning, going out for a jog, and then half an hour or 40 minutes in the evening on the on the rollers. It was like that for a solid three weeks. And I slept in an altitude tent as well, during a period where I would have been doing an altitude block. So I have all the boxes ticked in terms of preparation.”
Rugby videos rather than Zwift rides
Anyone who has used a turbo trainer knows how tedious they can be, particularly without a distraction. Camier told stickybottle that he understood Dunbar chose not to use an online training platform such as Zwift. Dunbar subsequently confirmed this, saying he preferred another approach.
Related News
“I will go on Spotify, and I go on YouTube,” he said. “I watched lots of rugby videos over the last while. I don’t normally use Zwift. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just prefer to get on the turbo and watch something else.
"I prefer to sit down and listen to a podcast or watch some videos on YouTube or something like that, rather than looking at your power and heart rate on the screen. We do that for most of the year. It is not very often you can cycle and watch YouTube, so I prefer to do that.”
We’ve all heard tales of people doing one-off marathon sessions on an indoor trainer but Dunbar said that he didn’t do any such heroics. He’s a full time athlete training hard all year around and so balancing staying physically fit and mentally fresh was important. Besides, he felt the quality of the sessions he was doing plus the two blocks of training a day was more than enough.
“The longest ride I did was actually two hours. I stuck to the two. That was all that my mind could take,” he said. “But when you are doing specific work on the turbo for two hours, that’s easily the equivalent of almost three hours on the road.
"I mean, if you think about where we train in Monaco and Nice, if you go out for a three or four hour ride, you’re climbing for 40 minutes. You would come back with four hours, but you have descended for an hour, an hour 15 of that. So if you consider that on the turbo there’s no brake, there’s no freewheeling, it adds up.
“You do that in the morning and then that extra hour in the evening adds so much volume to that. I was with Phil Deignan a few weeks ago and he was saying, ‘wow, that’s like doing five hours on the road'.”
Even when breaking things up, sticking to his routine took a lot of discipline. “Mentally it is long,” he confirmed. “You finish one session, and then you’re just waiting to get the other one out of the way. But you have to wait a while to have that bit of a break.
“There was specific stuff that Alex put in which helped the spin go a bit quicker as well. Like, when you have something to do. The worst is when you’re sitting on it for two hours and there is nothing to do. If you can break it up and have bits and pieces to do during that, it is grand.”
So what about when he returned to the road? Dunbar spoke to stickybottle on the day he was able to take his first road spin post-operation, and gave an insight into what he was planning to do in the weeks between then and when he would return to racing.
The plan was to get in regular sessions on the road, doing fast work and also shorter more intense efforts as well. “And then maybe you tap into that threshold zone and stuff out on the road that you wouldn’t necessarily get to on the turbo. Your power and heartrate take a hit when you get on a turbo, it’s a different feeling."
Having a fully functioning body will help in doing the higher intensity workouts. “Alex always says it’s just a case of being able to get out in the road and working the other stuff,” he continued. “But the other stuff literally depends on the hand, on how hard you can grip the bars. Because everyone knows when you cycle, the harder you go on the bike the more you grip the bars.
“It’s not the case that I’ve been doing any full-tilt sprints where I am out of the saddle. You just have to wait until the hand is ready for that.”
- Stickybottle will have a full feature soon on Dunbar’s crash, his recovery and his Giro ambitions
