Athlete: Tudor Cazaceanu

Tudor is a young MTB XC and Marathon racer from Romania, competing for the UCI MTB team BikeExpert Racing Team and was a member of the Romanian National team as a Junior. He’s also a student, balancing his athletic career with his schooling and education.

The aims with working together were to develop Tudor’s broad fitness, to figure out where his strengths and weaknesses were and to nurture his race craft, since he was still learning how to measure his effort and race smartly. We had goals in the form of races with varying levels of priority too, which the training plan as a whole was built around and periodised for.

Our Approach

It was important from the start to have regular feedback and easy communication between Tudor and us, so that there was a low barrier to any questions he had.

That meant regular communication via WhatsApp and TrainingPeaks’ comments feature primarily. Next, we ensured that we monitored fitness markers like FTP on a fairly regular basis.

Whilst FTP is limited in what it can show us about broad fitness improvement, given that it’s only a single metric, we tracked this via specific testing but also other power durations in both training and racing, looking to see improvements in the aspects of his fitness that were most specific to his event demands on the MTB.

As a student and a young athlete who was still developing, sometimes his time was limited because of school (similar to most athletes who hold down a full-time job) or his recovery from very demanding events took a little longer than anticipated.

We typically planned 1-2 weeks in advance so that Tudor could plan his time and be be reactive when his schedule changed, but spoke often about the longer-term plan and what events he was targeting in the future.

Finally, after a few weeks of trying a variety of different workouts across a range of different aspects of his fitness, we started to find what he responded best to and what became the “staple” workouts in his plan, which were:

• Longer intervals of 6-12 minutes, either as steady-state intervals or using a micro-burst approach

• Long endurance rides to consistently work on his aerobic foundation

• Steady rides on both the road and MTB with short bursts included throughout

The Results

When we began our collaboration, Tudor started off with an FTP of 254w, tested using a 20 minute protocol in March 2018.

Throughout the season of working together, we were able to increase his FTP to 312w by September of the same year (an 18.5% improvement over a ~6-month period).

Tudor’s Comments

“I decided to work with Tom for the 2018 season and I don’t think I could’ve made a better decision. Tom was the one who introduced me to the method of training with a power meter and helped me understand how it works. We worked together to improve both my form throughout the year, but also my racing strategy. I think that one of the most important aspects to look for when you’re searching for a coach is the communication capability between the two of us and this is why I appreciated Tom in first place. He is always open to answer your questions, give proper advice, or even to motivate you when you’re feeling down, which I think is a huge thing to be able to do as a coach for your athlete”