I've blogged a preview of this year's Duo Normand two-up team time trial (2010 Duo Normand Preview) - and about a week or two ago, I began thinking about ramping up the training for the event. I've been something of an afficionado of Pete Read's turbo training manual - The Annual Manual a.k.a. The Black Book. This presents a straightforward and progressive month by month training programme. It's safe to say this was behind my time trialling successes of 2000-2003. Since then, as I think I've written, my ability to stick to a programme of training has been compromised by the demands of the day job.
Over the time I was following the programme, I found I was able to fine-tune and tweak the programme to suit my strengths and weaknesses. this was made easier by the collection of turbo training sessions that Pete Read presented in The White Book. [Apologies for the lack of web links to Pete Read, but last time I looked, his web presence had vanished]
So the programme I've adopted sees me fitting in some turbo sessions of short hard intervals around longer low intensity road rides and some time trials (I have a '50' on 5/9/10 and a '10' on 12/9/10, the two weekends before the Duo Normand itself. This morning's session was a set of 10 x 1 minute intervals at slightly higher than race pace, with 1 minute recoveries. Quite a difficult session, albeit quite brief. This, coupled with another variant, are progressive as I approach the Duo: in one case by doing more intervals, in the other by extending from 1' to 2' to 3' (and so forth) intervals. I think these, together with the remaining time trials in my season will be enough to peak for the Duo, ideally with a few days easy beforehand.