What it Takes to Make a Break

The hardest part of racing is the battle to establish the breakaway. Suddenly, all bets are off and friendships are tossed away like discarded water bottles. It's exciting to watch but hell to live through for professionals. But what are the exact physiological requirements needed to make a break successful?

The Stuff They Don't Show on TV

We're spoiled with TV coverage of racing. With a few clicks of the computer mouse, we can find live feed from the biggest Euro races. You can also find it on YouTube shortly afterwards. When the coverage begins, what we usually see is a breakaway up ahead in a steady rotation, with the peloton rolling along at a steady pace some minutes behind.

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This coverage is nice, but it also misses the best and often hardest part of the race, and that's the first hour when the breakaway becomes established. Riders are constantly attacking off the front, individually or in small groups, while the peloton chases every attempt down until the right combination is allowed to go up the road.

With such a frantic first part of the race, the pace may average over 50 kilometers per hour for 1 to 2 hours. The pace is so aggressive from the gun that some pros are now warming up on trainers before heading off to race for 4 to 5 hours.

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How Is it Done?

As with all aspects of smart training, the best way to train for racing is to understand the demands and then figure out how to train to meet those demands.

The scientific literature reports professional riders' power outputs for single day and stage races. However, knowing what we know now about the doping epidemic, it has become nearly useless to treat them as anything but science fiction. And now, thanks to pervasive paranoia, pros guard their power numbers closer than the neighborhood Rottweiler guards its bone.

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What we can do, of course, is to use our own power meters to record what happens during the hardest parts of racing, whether that is on the first parts of the race when the group is sorting itself out, the tough climb of a circuit race or the final kilometers. The challenge comes when we're not yet strong enough to make the selection. How do we get data when we're off the back?

Scouting by Strava

One piece of technological manna from heaven has been the almost ubiquitous adoption of Strava by tech-obsessed cyclists. For every hill worth climbing, there is a Strava segment, and going through the rankings to spot familiar names will give you a very clear insight into how fast you need to be able to climb particular hills to keep up with competitors in your category.

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This is especially useful if you can match segments ridden during prior races, so that you can see what the demands are during the race rather than single "beat the KOM" efforts.

For example, our local Niagara Classic race always features Saylor's Hill, a final 400-meter wall of about 11 percent average with peaks of 17 percent. In previous years, the finish line was at the top of the wall, and races often ended in a mass final hill sprint from a small group of survivors.

Checking out Strava, there are over 2,000 rides by 378 riders, with many of the best times being set on race day itself. Therefore, while the KOM is 58 seconds with averages of 25.2 kilometers per hour and 441 watts (W), I can see that my category of competitors are averaging anywhere from one-minute to one-minute and thirty seconds (17.8 kilometers per hour).

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Indeed, I know one of my competitors is nearly my exact weight and he averaged 406 W, so ultimately that's what I'm going to need to target and train for in order to make the breakaways that form at the top.

Science Non-Fiction

Luckily, there is also emerging scientific focus on pacing strategies in sports such as cycling and speedskating. Going from the premise that energy is a finite resource, these studies are trying to understand how best to use that limited energy to maximize average power output and speed over different time trial distances.

Chris Abbiss of Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, Carl Foster of the University of Wisconsin—La Crosse and Jos de Koning of Vrije University of Amsterdam have been leaders in this theme of research.

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So let's look at some of their research and ideas from the August 2013 issue of International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance on the demands required to break away from the pack (Abbiss et al. 2013; Cohen et al. 2013).

Abbiss et al.

Chris's group, which included Vincent Villerius—a sport scientist from Team Cofidis—reviewed professional and Australian Institute of Sport data on the specific demands of the initial establishing of a breakaway in professional cycling. Rather than a single hard sprint to get clear of the pack followed by a return to time trialing at threshold, a breakaway is much more complex in power output.

What Abbiss et al. found was that professional breakaways required cyclists to generate not one, but multiple sprints of 5 to 15 seconds at high (~9.5 W/kg to 14 W/kg) wattages in order to respond to other attacks, jump clear of the pack, or bridge to the break. Indeed, some races involved riders performing less than 100 for very short (less than 15 seconds) bursts above 70 percent peak aerobic power output (roughly what we may think of as a steady and hard "tempo" pace).

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Once a slight gap is opened to the pack, the breakaway cyclist then needs to keep a gap, with a high power output at above threshold (~450 to 500 W for the Cofidis pros) for 30 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on how hard the pack decides to chase. Obviously, many breakaway attempts are unsuccessful, so the unfortunate cyclist may have to repeat the above efforts several times as they try to get into the main break of the day.

If a breakaway is established, the fun and pain doesn't end. The simple fact of fewer riders to share the work means that the break riders have to maintain a higher power output than the much larger peloton (~3.3 compared to 2.6 W/kg, in unpublished observations from pro power files).

Cohen et al.

A related paper from Foster and de Koning on the same issue looked at the effect of hard-breakaway efforts on subsequent time trialing. In brief:

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• Trained cyclists rode two 10K time trials (with additional familiarization trials). The first 4K were controlled at a set pace for both trials.
• Cyclists received feedback on power output, speed and distance.
• One trial was a typical self-paced time trial effort from 4K to 10K.
• The next trial was a burst condition, where at 4K to 5K, the cyclists were told to hammer as hard as possible, with the idea of "breaking away," with the final 5K continued as a time trial.

The results highlight how physically and mentally taxing the effort of breaking away can be. In burst, the 4K to 5K power output was much higher (282 W) compared to the control (240 W).

The burst was in some senses a painful bust, however:

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• After the burst at 4K to 5K, power output dropped from 282 W down to 220 W, remaining below the control values until 9K.
• Ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) were obviously much higher during the 1K burst (9 on a 10 point scale) than the rest of the burst TT and also throughout the control TT.
• Interestingly, RPE increased steadily over the 10K TT in both conditions. But despite similar RPEs (except over that one kilometer burst), the lower power output in the burst condition showed that the cyclists never recovered physically, and also struggled to recover mentally from that break effort.
• TT times were much faster for the control (16 minutes and 36 seconds) than burst (17 minutes).

Summary

Both the Abbiss et al. and the Cohen et al. studies highlight just how difficult it is to physically break away from the pack. It also helps us to see just how painful the plight is of riders like Tony Martin, being caught meters from the line after an all-day solo break. What are some things we should take away from these studies and apply towards our own training?

• Breaking away is a complex power dynamic. You need to train your sprinting and its repeatability, your 3 to 5 min anaerobic capacity, and raise your threshold power. Just one of these abilities is not enough, and all of these must be combined with minimal recovery in between.
• Breaking away hurts. You're definitely going to pay a price for it, so do not do it unless you absolutely mean it. This applies both to early breaks and also for breaking away near the finish for the win.
• Cheer for the breakaway—they deserve it.

Ride fast and have fun!

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