While you’re planning your Christmas lunch, spare a thought for the elite athletes counting down the days before the Cycling Australia Road National Championships.
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The event begins in the first week of January, and will involve young cyclists, paracyclists, and world champions battling it out on Sturt Street, then up and down Mount Buninyong, before racing against the clock to finish.
The preparation involved is almost as gruelling as the racing, according to Federation University’s Dr Brendan O’Brien, with athletes beginning to taper their training and pack on the carbohydrates.
“At Christmas, we tend to skew towards the sugars and fats, and elite athletes can’t afford to do that,” he said.
“They’ll have to be more disciplined, they’ll need to maintain a year-long diet of being healthy and good.”
The diet’s not the only hard part - the RoadNats takes place in the middle of summer, with soaring temperatures.
To counter this, the riders have to know how to sweat.
“There’s a big emphasis on ... heat acclimatisation, adjusting to the hot conditions by training in the heat and ensuring the body becomes better at sweating,” Dr O’Brien said.
But how do you get good at sweating?
“It doesn’t take too long - if you spend about 10 days cycling or running in the heat for about an hour, you find the body adapts, and the major adaptation is that the body’s sweat glands are activated a at a lower core temperature, which means you produce more sweat more quickly to get rid of heat more effectively,” he explained.
“It only takes 10 days, but it involves slogging away in the heat, and it becomes draining, because the quality of training goes down - it’s an intricate balance between the athlete working out what’s best for them so they can maintain their intensity of training, but not tire themselves.”
This year, the road race will go straight through the Fed Uni campus, and deputy dean of the exercise and sports science faculty, Dr Deborah Pascoe, said she was keen for her students to get involved in the event.
“It’s right on our doorstep,” she said.
“In the sports management program in particular, and some of the exercise and sports management students will be doing hours volunteering.
“It’ll probably be things like marshalling, probably nothing technical or elite testing, but they’re the capabilities that we have here and we’re exploring into the future.”
The RoadNats begins on Friday, January 4, with the criterium course taking over Sturt Street, before the action shifts to Buninyong for the road races and time trials.
Rides for the community are also planned on the courses across the event.
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