One of our mantras at Riding Bumps is that you need race experience to become a better SUP racer. SUP Racing is a skill that must be trained and the only way to train that skill is to toe the line and race. We have seen too many athletes show up at races at peak fitness only to place poorly because they didn’t understand SUP race tactics, they were a bundle of nerves and cracked under the pressure they placed on themselves, or botched their race nutrition.

In order to learn race tactics, get your head screwed on straight, and learn other essential SUP racing skills, our general recommendation is that you should enter at least one race per month before your A-priority SUP race or race a minimum of 4 races per year.

All of this racing, however, becomes problematic if your goal is to do well at all of your races. Racing well generally involves tapering and resting before a race. If you are constantly tapering and racing you won’t have any time to do the training you need to do to get faster. The solution to this problem is to plan on placing poorly at most of your races.

Most of the races on your racing calendar should be considered to be B-priority races. These races are essential to your development as a racer because you will learn essential skills such as race tactics, race day nutrition, and dealing with your nerves, but how well you place at these races is of little or no importance.

In the Riding Bumps programs we call these races “train through” races because you should be training right through them. You will not taper for these races. These races are workouts and these workouts should be built into your training program.

For our athletes to get the most out of their “train through” races we routinely encourage them to get out of their comfort zone and test their abilities during these races.  For example, we might have an athlete who we feel races too conservatively go out as hard as they possibly can to try to blow themselves up at the beginning of the race. The goal is to have them learn how to deal with adversity while racing and test their boundaries.   As another example, we will have some of our athletes race at the end of a huge training block. This type of overload can push their fitness to new heights.

The pros do it too

Professional athletes race dozens of times each year. Although racing is their job, they are not expected to do well at every race they enter.  The pro’s know that most of their races are training races that they use them to get race experience,  test new race tactics or equipment, fulfill sponsor or team obligations, push their fitness at the end of a huge training block etc.  Their primary goal at these races is not to win.

When you see a pro in the middle of the pack, although it is certainly possible that they had a bad day,  it is more likely that they are perfectly happy with their placement.  If you do a little probing you might find that they just got done with a monster 3 week training block and they were cracked before they even got to the start line. This is also why the next time you beat Jenny Kalmbach or Chuck Patterson at that race in early February you should think twice before you tell the world and post about it on Facebook or Twitter. While you were racing to win they might have been out race training.