Alejandro Valverde has warned against turbo training too much, suggesting he only does a little more than an hour on the home trainer during lock-down in Spain.
The 2009 Vuelta
winner and former world champion said some of the training he had seen other
riders doing on the turbo was “outrageous”.
He believed the
effort required – both mentally and physically – to train hard on a home
trainer was being underestimated by cyclists.
Valverde also
unsure if any racing would take place this year due to Covid19, despite the UCI
saying all three Grand Tours would be held starting with the Tour de France on
August 29th.
However, if the
races went ahead he believed the results would be very different because the
routine of pro riders had been disturbed so much this year.
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He also believed the very different temperatures the racing would take place in would make for very unusual conditions for such hard events, which would impact results more than people realised.
Speaking to El
Mundo in his native Spain, Valverde said he had focused on keeping a solid
routine during the past month of lockdown.
“I try to organise myself. I get up at seven, I do roller
for an hour and a quarter, breakfast, then I am with the family, in the
afternoon gym and core,” he said.
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Asked of the much later
start date of the Tour de France – which is set to be two months later than its
usual start – would changed the list of favourites and give Chris Froome and
Tom Dumoulin more time to recover from their crash injuries, Valverde said:
“It may be, but I think
Tour, Giro and Vuelta will be very atypical races, with results very different
from those of the usual dates. The body is used to a routine and to specific
temperatures.
“In addition, the fact of
being (in) a long period at home will influence a lot. The body gets used to
everything and thanks to the latest-generation (home trainers) everything is
easier; simulating the road runs very well.
“But some (riders) are doing
outrageous things with training sessions of five or six hours in a row. This
does not make sense because we do not know what the closest objectives will be.
The roller burns you physically and mentally.”
He also believed the UCI and the organisers of
the Grand Tours could not simply change the dates of the races. Instead, they
would also need to examine the route in the context of what will be new weather
patterns for the races due to the delay.
“I believe that the route should be changed, just
as the dates have changed,” he said of having the Vuelta in November, as a
winter event rather than racing in high summer.
“This year, the route goes through the northern
zone, the coldest. So it would be necessary to look for warmer regions and
(mountains) that can be climbed on those dates. Everything will be very
distorted.”
Valverde, who has previously served a
doping-related ban from racing and so has experience of returning from a long
lay-off, said it was possible the whole season would be lost.
If so, he may delay his retirement by a year and
continue racing until the end of 2022, though that was not yet clear.
“At the beginning of the (Covid19) confinement I
did not get the idea of losing this year, but seeing how everything is
progressing, I am thinking more and more about it,” he said of racing possibly
not returning this year.
“You take care of yourself and train with the roller, but you do it with little motivation. You can't do specific jobs, because you don't know what your goals will be.”
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