I’m 40yrs old CAT1 i used to race pro back in 2009 and now have the opportunity to do Masters 35+ and Pro,1,2 races on the same day. In races without pros I can podium in a Pro1,2 crit and win a masters crit or podium. In a race with pros I can do my best and see how it goes.
What are the pros and cons of doubling up from a physiological standpoint?
Are there any pros?
This saturday the races would be separated by 6hrs which seems better than close together. I’ve never doubled up before. The Masters event is always before the Pro event in my area.
I have a crap tonne of experience doing multiple crits on the same day (sometimes 3 in a day, and once did 4 in a day), on back to back days, as well as racing back to back seniors and masters track races and racing two 10 mile TTs in a day. Depending on your fitness, your physiology, where you are in your season, your goals, your competition, etc… it may be a great thing, or it may put you into a hole.
For the track racing, I would frequently roll straight to the rail after a lap of the track following the finish of the previous race. For crits and TTs, I pin the number for the latter race on first, then pin the number for the first race on top of it. I’ve done crits immediately back to back where I’d roll straight to the line and have someone unpin the number from the previous race while folks were finishing their warm up lap, and have had as many as three hours between races. My preference would be to have one race in between my races, second choice would be to roll straight up to the line with no break between races. I hated having more than an hour between races.
All of this aside, now that I’m in my mid-60s, I might do multiple races very, very infrequently.
eta: As for pros/cons, the thing(s) to consider: race days with big gaps between races are basically two-a-day workouts, and back-to-back or small gaps are essentially longer than normal high intensity workouts. Whether it makes sense to do them or not depends on how they fit into your training, and you have to account for the extra training stress by resting more in the week(s) following such race days. I would caution that it’s pretty easy to overdo things. You can gut it out, training stress-wise, for a few weeks, maybe even months, but once you’ve overdone it, you’ve overdone it and you may be in a hole you can’t climb out of.