CX season preparation strategy: July 8 to September 13, 2026
- Athlete: Sidney McGill
- Scope: training strategy from July 8 through the Canmore C2 season opener on September 13, with requirements extending through the World Championships in Ostend on January 29, 2027
- Status: strategy document. Day-by-day scheduling stays in the dated calendar files and gets built week by week from this plan.
- Owner: Coach Luca (internal canonical plan). Gunnar Holmgren manages live TrainingPeaks; nothing here publishes to TP without operator request.
- Inputs:
season-goals.md,race-calendar.md,season-plan.md,travel-schedule.md,power-zones.md, and2026-07-05-ghost-cramping-analysis-and-recommendations.md
What this block has to produce
The season Sidney is preparing for runs 20 weeks: Canmore on September 13, six North American race weekends through October, Nationals on October 31 in Oro-Medonte, PanAms on November 7 in Washington, then Europe from late November through Worlds on January 29. The stated results goals are a PanAm podium defense, national title contention, one World Cup top-10, and top-12 at Worlds.
That calendar punishes riders who arrive with a narrow peak. Nobody holds razor form for 20 weeks; what survives is a deep aerobic base, short-power repeatability that recovers quickly between race days, tissue that tolerates racing every weekend, and a body that stays healthy through travel, cold, and compressed sleep. With Hashimoto's in the picture, the margin for overreaching is smaller than for most athletes, so this block builds durable capacity and leaves the fine sharpening late. The goal for September 13 is to arrive race-fit and hungry, not peaked. The goal for February 1 is to still be racing well.
Ghost of the Gravel left specific homework, documented in the cramping analysis. She raced the first two hours at roughly 20% above rehearsed intensity and her hamstrings failed under high-force work while her aerobic engine stayed intact. The fixes belong to this block: posterior-chain strength, race-intensity work practiced deep into fatigue, verified fueling rates, concrete pacing rules, and closing the data and logging gaps that let a sensor artifact reach coach notes.
Where she starts on July 8
Fitness is real. The race file shows a 260 W working FTP (about 4.2 W/kg), 45 minutes above threshold inside a 5:11 race, and an 80-minute steady endurance finish while cramping. Short power peaked at 563 W in the race and around 344 W for repeated short efforts in June. The base problems are known: one ride over four hours since the February layoff, near-zero gym work since spring, running barely reintroduced, and a cramping failure mode that is trainable. She is nine days post-race as this block opens, with recovery status unconfirmed because the debrief never happened.
Location: Orillia, ON through August 2, Vermont camp August 3-8, Orillia again through roughly August 22, then Alberta (return date TBD, August 23 or September 1). The Alberta window ends 90 minutes from the Canmore course, which is worth using.
Goals for September 13
- Race-ready short power. Established and tested benchmarks for 30-second, 1-minute, and 3-minute repeatability, trending up across the block. Baselines get set in July testing; targets get written from the baselines, not invented now.
- FTP confirmed twice: a July test to anchor training zones (the 260 W estimate comes from race data, not a test) and a late-August retest.
- A posterior chain that holds force under fatigue. Two gym sessions a week all block, hamstring-focused, with documented load progression. By September she should be past the adaptation soreness phase and into maintenance, because in-season is too late to start.
- CX skills at race speed: dismounts, remounts, barriers, run-ups, off-camber turns, sand entries, and starts, practiced weekly from mid-July and twice weekly from mid-August on the CX bike.
- Running that survives cyclocross. Progress from the current conservative run/walk to 20-25 minutes continuous plus short hard uphill repeats, without ankle or calf complaint. Cap it there. She is a cyclist.
- Fueling verified, not planned. At least four long or hard sessions with 90-100 g/hr carbohydrate and 700-1000 mg/hr sodium actually consumed and logged. Race-week and race-morning templates written and rehearsed before Canmore.
- Heat tolerance for September racing in the eastern US, built in late July and August (Rochester and Roanoke race weekends can run hot and humid).
- Health screening closed out: TSH and free T4 plus ferritin, vitamin D, and electrolytes drawn in July; the race debrief completed; the IAE field screens run if the debrief points one-sided.
- Data infrastructure working: HR and power recording verified continuous on every key session, and the Recovery and Nutrition log sections active again.
Phase structure
Phase A: reset and foundation (July 8-19)
The first job is confirming Ghost is absorbed. Week one stays moderate: endurance riding, one tempo touch late in the week if the legs answer, and the athlete debrief as a blocking item before any intensity is prescribed. The gym block starts here, twice a week, beginning with movement re-entry and building to Romanian deadlifts, Nordic eccentrics, single-leg hip bridges, and step-downs. The first two weeks will produce soreness; that is why they happen now and not in August.
Week two is a testing week: FTP test, short-power benchmarks (30 s, 1 min, 3 min), and a verified-complete HR and power trace on every test. Bloodwork happens in this window too, and the CX bike fit gets verified against the recorded road fit before skills volume starts — the Ghost analysis flagged saddle height and setback as a hamstring-load factor, and the CX bike is where the season's hours land.
Decision point July 19: test results in hand, debrief closed, gym tolerated. If any of those is missing, Phase B waits rather than starting on assumptions.
Phase B: CX build (July 20 - August 16)
This is the biggest training block of the season, and the last chance for one. Everything after mid-August is sharpening or racing.
The intensity work shifts from gravel's steady pressure to cyclocross's stochastic demand: VO2 intervals (3-5 min), 30/30s and 40/20s, and race-pace repeatability sessions where the last repeats matter more than the first. Two quality days a week, three only in the strongest weeks. The Ghost lesson applies directly: some of this intensity goes deep into rides, not just fresh at the start, so her cramp threshold moves. Use her precursor-sensation skill deliberately — ride to the first warning in late-session efforts, back off, recover, repeat.
One long ride a week continues, 3-4 hours with pressure blocks in the final hour, holding the durability she built for Ghost. This is also where fueling gets verified: 90-100 g/hr and measured sodium on every long ride, logged afterward, no exceptions. By September this needs to be boring routine.
CX skills start weekly on the CX bike: dismount/remount flow, barriers, run-ups, starts from a grid. Starts matter double for her — a good grid start is precisely the kind of maximal effort that triggered the race-day failure, so start practice doubles as cramp-threshold work.
Running progresses to two or three short sessions a week, adding brief hard uphill efforts (10-30 s) that mimic run-up demand. Any ankle, calf, or SI complaint resets the progression; a running injury in August is the most avoidable way to ruin September.
The Vermont camp (August 3-8) sits mid-phase. Camp load counts as training load: if camp brings high volume or group intensity, the weeks either side absorb it, and gym pauses rather than being crammed around travel. Confirm bike access, food (GF/DF logistics at a camp need advance work), and sleep before departure.
Heat adaptation runs through the back half of the phase: two or three heat sessions a week (overdressed trainer rides or post-ride sauna where available), building passive tolerance for September's eastern US race weekends.
Hashimoto's guardrails govern the whole phase. This is the block where overreach risk peaks, so the rules are explicit: one genuinely light day per week minimum, every fourth week reduced by roughly a third, and if sleep, appetite, mood, or resting physiology slip for more than 48 hours, density gets cut before volume. Hard sessions are fueled, not survived — the April-May pattern of chronic fat and energy deficit cannot reappear under peak load.
Decision point August 16: post-camp fatigue assessed, load absorbed, benchmarks trending up. This is also the deadline for confirming the Alberta return date, which shapes Phase C logistics.
Phase C: sharpening (August 17 - September 6)
Volume comes down about a quarter; intensity quality holds. The emphasis moves from building capacity to expressing it: full race simulations on the CX bike (40-50 minutes at race rhythm with starts, dismounts, and running mixed in), twice-weekly skills, and short-power sessions that keep the top end alive without accumulating fatigue. The in-race cramp protocol from the Ghost analysis gets rehearsed inside the simulations — two gears easier and spin, forward on the saddle, 60-90 seconds off pressure, resume — so that by Canmore it is a reflex, not a plan.
The FTP and short-power retest happens in the first week of this phase, and the September racing plan gets written from the results — including pacing rules for race one. The Ghost rule carries forward: pace to demonstrated numbers, not to ambition.
Once she is back in Alberta, ride the Canmore course or its nearest available terrain. Altitude matters here — Canmore sits at about 1,300 m, and arriving a week-plus early (the August 23 return option) handles it better than arriving September 10.
Gym drops to maintenance, one or two lighter sessions a week, preserving the block's strength gains without soreness. Race-week templates get finalized: breakfast timing, warm-up structure, openers day, tire and equipment checklists. None of this should be new on September 10.
Decision point September 6: fresh, sharp, healthy. If she is flat, race week trims further; if she is stale, the answer was in August and gets noted for next year.
Phase D: race week (September 7-13)
Standard race-week shape, already proven in June: easy early week, openers Friday, race Sunday... adjusted to Canmore's actual schedule. Low volume, full carbohydrate availability, no experiments. Canmore is a season opener, not a target — the job is clean execution, a hard honest effort, and data that calibrates the seven race weekends that follow.
Requirements that extend past September 13
These are commitments this strategy makes on behalf of the whole season, so they get named now.
Racing rhythm and selection. The NA block runs seven race weekends in nine weeks. Not every C1/C2 needs a full effort; Charm City (October 3-4) and the Nationals-PanAm double (October 31 - November 7) are the blocks that matter, and mid-week training between race weekends is maintenance and repair, not building. The post-PanAm week and early January are the two protected recovery windows of the season, planned as recovery now so nobody has to negotiate for them when tired.
Strength maintenance continues all season, one session a week minimum through the NA block, dropping to movement maintenance in Europe. The posterior-chain work in this block is the insurance policy; abandoning it in October voids it by December.
Health checkpoints: bloodwork repeats before the Europe departure in mid-November, and levothyroxine timing gets a written protocol for each time-zone shift, because the season crosses nine of them. Any recurrence of cramping in racing triggers the IAE field screens immediately if they have not already been run.
Europe preparation happens in the background of this block rather than in a panic in November: housing and base logistics, GF/DF food systems for Belgium, equipment redundancy (race wheels, mud tires, spare bike status), and a travel-fatigue plan for the Ostrava-Tábor opening double. season-plan.md phases 6-8 hold the race-block detail; this block's contribution is arriving there with nothing improvised.
Data and logging discipline: verified-continuous sensor traces on key sessions, active Recovery and Nutrition log sections, a written fueling note after every long ride, and a debrief after every race weekend as a blocking item for the following week's plan. The Ghost analysis took eight days and a browser session to reconstruct what a five-minute debrief would have captured; the season calendar does not have that slack.
Risks
The Vermont camp is the least-controlled week of the block and lands mid-build; it gets planned around, not absorbed by default. The Alberta return date is unconfirmed and moves two weeks of Phase C logistics. Running progression carries ankle history. The August build is the season's peak overreach window with Hashimoto's underneath — the guardrails above are the mitigation, and they only work if the logging that feeds them is alive. And the strength block will make her slower for two weeks in July before it makes her more durable for six months; that trade is accepted here, once, in writing, so it does not get relitigated during the sore weeks.